A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.

my belief that having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something.

To program is to understand.

Intelligence isn't what you know; it's how many of your own problems you can solve.

To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.

The programmers have a saying, you know? 'If we understand how we do it, it isn't artificial intelligence anymore.'"

Coding is to programming what typing is to writing, if you learn to program by learning to code, you essentially only know how to type

All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

It isn't about what you do, but how you do it

Programming, when stripped of all its circumstantial irrelevancies, boils down to no more and no less than very effective thinking so as to avoid unmastered complexity, to very vigorous separation of your many different concerns.

learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code.

When you write a computer program you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions. But when there's a bug — and all programs have bugs — you've got to debug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute … and you iterate. And that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning.