Kent Beck

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

—Kent Beck.

Write tests until fear is transformed into boredom.

—Kent Beck. Test Driven Development: By Example.

Brilliance in a scientist does not consist in being right more often but in being wrong about more interesting topics.

—Kent Beck.

Given the choice between an extremely skilled loner and a competent-but-social programmer, XP teams consistently choose the more social candidate. The best interviewing technique is to have the candidate work with the team for a day. Pair programming provides an excellent test of technical and social skills.

—Kent Beck. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change.

Software development is a game of insight, and insight comes to the prepared, rested, relaxed mind.

—Kent Beck. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change.

No matter the circumstance you can always improve. You can always start improving with yourself. You can always start improving today.

—Kent Beck. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change.

Grady Booch

The task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity.

—Grady Booch. Object-oriented Analysis and Design with Applications, 2nd edition. Addison–Wesley, 1994.

Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose. Clean code never obscures the designer's intent but rather is full of crisp abstractions and straightforward lines of control.

—Grady Booch. Quoted in: Robert C. Martin. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Prentice Hall (1 Aug. 2008).

Ward Cunningham

You know you are working on clean code when each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected. You can call it beautiful code when the code also makes it look like the language was made for the problem.

—Ward Cunningham. Quoted in: Robert C. Martin. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Prentice Hall (1 Aug. 2008).

Emanuel Derman

...at AT&T in 1980, the whole firm was embracing C, the simultaneously graceful and yet practical language invented by Dennis Ritchie about ten years earlier at Murray Hill. He had devised C to be a high-level tool with which to write portable versions of UNIX, the operating system also invented there by Ken Thompson and Ritchie. Now everything from telephone switching systems to word-processing software was being written in C, on UNIX, all with amazing style. Eventually, even physicists, who are generally interested only in the number of digits after a decimal point, began to forsake ugly utilitarian FORTRAN for poetically stylish C. Programming was in the late stages of a revolution about which I was just beginning to learn.

—Emanuel Derman. My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance. Wiley, 2007.

When you program well, you are trying to design a machine to perform a task. You design with a man-made programming language—FORTRAN, Lisp, C++ or Java, for example. Programming is not that different from instructing a friend to perform a task for you. The big difference is that the computer is much more literal than any friend, and so every detail of the task must be specified as though the computer knows nothing about the world.
Until I arrived at the AT&T Bell Labs in 1980, I had never realized how elegant and challenging programming could be.
[...]
What are you doing when you program? You are trying to use a language to specify an imagined world and its details as accurately as possible. You are trying to create this world on a machine that can understand and execute only simple commands. You do this solely by writing precise instructions, often many hundreds of thousands of lines long. Your sequence of instructions must be executed without ambiguity, by an uncomprehending automaton, the computer, and yet, in parallel, must be read, comprehended, remembered and modified by you and other programmers. Just as poetry strives to resolve the tension between form and meaning, so programming must resolve the conflict between intelligibility and concision. In this endeavor, the language you employ is critically important.

—Emanuel Derman. My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance. Wiley, 2007.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.

—Edsger W. Dijkstra. Notes on Structured Programming. Academic Press, 1972.

Martin Fowler

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.