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Quotations

Antoine de Saint-Exupery	You know you have achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
Albert Einstein	If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Fred Brooks	Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
Larry Wall	the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris
Howard Aiken	Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Paul Graham	The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed.... the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working.
Steve Yegge	Agile evades criticism [by] embracing anything good, and disclaiming anything bad.
Bjarne Stroustrup	The idea of programming as a semiskilled task...is dangerous.... one aim should be to make tools that will serve skilled professionals— not...people who can hardly understand the problems, let alone express solutions.
Paul Graham	Programming FAQ proctologists have to do things that would be considered extremely rude if ordinary people did them. Being Popular Expert hackers are a tiny minority, admittedly, but that tiny minority write all the good software... Hackers are lazy, in the same way that mathematicians and modernist architects are lazy: they hate anything extraneous. A hacker would consider being asked to write `add x to y giving z` instead of `z = x+y` as something between an insult to his intelligence and a sin against God. A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase "software engineering" shake their heads disapprovingly. Design Philosophy The great languages have been the ones that good programmers designed for their own use— C, Smalltalk, Lisp. The languages that were consciously designed for "average" programmers (Cobol, Pascal, Ada) have tended to be evolutionary dead ends.
Kode Vicious	most certifications ... certify only that you can pass a test, not that you can think about problems, which is the more important skill.
Paul Graham	On Lisp What skates are to ice, functional programming is to Lisp. ... in Lisp ... an invocation owns objects it receives as return values, but not objects passed to it as arguments. Code written so that each invocation only modifies what it owns is almost as good as purely functional code. In Lisp's dynamic environment, functional programs can be written with unusual speed, and at the same time, can be unusually reliable. Experienced Lisp programmers actually design their programs to be easy to test: They try to segregate side-effects in a few functions, allowing the greater part of the program to be written in a purely functional style. If a function must perform side-effects, they try at least to give it a functional interface. They give each function a single, well-defined purpose.