Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Programs do not come out of the minds of any one person or two people such as ourselves, but out of day-to-day work, out of interaction between organizers and the communities in which they work.

Programs do not come out of the minds of any one person or two people such as ourselves, but out of day-to-day work, out of interaction between organizers and the communities in which they work.

People are inventing new programming language all the time but I think that's not the big problem is actually writing programs. I think the big technical problem in building system is what I call "the connecting things together problem". It's a version nightmare problem. It's given things in different languages and actually connecting them together.

This is a thing that really scares me, are people developing large applications that they don’t understand.

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

Programmers do not ordinarily work in isolation. Although an individual programmer may find herself assigned the task of writing a program, even then she has other programmers to whom she may turn for help — and who, at the same time, may be turning to her.

Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?” Cooper asks. “They are programming people,

So today, let's write a program simply. But let's also realize that tomorrow, we're going to make it more complex, because tomorrow it's going to do more. So we'll take that simplicity and we'll lose some of it. But tomorrow, hopefully tomorrow's program is as simple as possible for tomorrow's needs. Hopefully we'll preserve simplicity as the program grows.

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.

When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.