# catwell's favorite quotes

CREDIT:

Many of those come from http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/. Others 
come from books I have read. I found the rest of them in various places 
on the Internet.


We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really
excellent. Because this is our life. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our
lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.
 -- Steve Jobs

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But
that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good
ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.
 -- Steve Jobs

If there is no solution, then there is no problem.
 -- Les Shadoks

There is no scientific method.
 -- Lee Smolin, theoretical physicist

I made a discovery today. I found a computer.
Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to.
If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.
Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
 -- Mentor, January 8, 1986

It is better to be technically elegant with a higher learning curve, than to
be easy to use, and technically crap. Layers of abstraction that serve to hide
internals are never a good thing. Instead, the internals should be designed in
a way such that they NEED no hiding.
 -- Aaron Griffin, Arch Linux Overlord

When in doubt, use brute force.
 -- Ken Thompson

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
 -- Dijkstra

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because
software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.
 -- David Gelernter, CS teacher at Yale

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer
doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it
for the love of programming.
 -- John Carmack

In everything uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete 
makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for 
growth.
 -- In Idleness (japanese essay from the 14th century)

In my opinion, perfection is not reached when there is nothing left to 
add but when there is nothing left to remove. That means the perfection 
of a thing and its essence are a single reality. But here is the real 
challenge: how do you get to the essence of things?
 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstation is instead an 
"airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers 
while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the 
difference--one can see only a very few things at once.
 -- Frederick Brooks, "No Silver Bullet"

The building metaphor has outlived its usefulness. [...] Let us turn 
nature and study complexity in living things. [...] The secret is that 
it is grown, not built.
 -- Frederick Brooks, "No Silver Bullet"

You can be productive or safe, not both.
 -- Rob Pike

Eventually it all comes to this: expect nothing, get involved!
 -- JL Mélenchon (Grand Journal)

Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
 -- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month"

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
 -- Alan Kay

Lua is the C of dynamic languages: lean, fast - and real men write their 
own libraries.
 -- Steve Donovan, on lua-l

Artists work best alone. Work alone.
 -- Steve Wozniak

Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet 
dramatically transformed, it will.  People, companies, investors and 
even countries can’t stop this transformation. The only choice you have 
is whether you join the side of innovation and progress or you don’t.
 -- Chris Dixon, VC & entrepreneur

The worst features [of a language] are the attractive nuisances, the 
features that are both useful and dangerous.
 -- Douglas Crockford (JSLint, JSON...)

The problem with being a beginner is that you get a lot of practice 
staying a beginner.
 -- Alan Kay

You can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you can be 
an engineer and stay an engineer and get rich.
 -- Allen Baum, to Steve Wozniak

A true friend will stab you in the front.
 -- Oscar Wilde

Bottomless wonders come from simple rules repeated without end.
 -- Benoit Mandelbrot

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data 
structures and their relationships.
 -- Linus Torvalds

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small 
trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, 
you'll just overdesign.
 -- Linus Torvalds

Some specious value of "correctness" is often irrelevant because it 
doesn't matter. While performance almost always matters.
 -- Linus Torvalds

There really are only two acceptable models of development: "think and 
analyze" or "years and years of testing on thousands of machines". Those 
two really do work.
 -- Linus Torvalds

There is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way, and that is 
reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost 
simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.
 -- Tony Hoare (QuickSort, CSP)

Debugging time increases as a square of the program's size.
 -- Chris Wenham

Code never lies, comments sometimes do.
 -- Ron Jeffries (XP, Agile Manifesto)

Software sucks because users demand it to.
 -- Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO

The only sin is to make a choice without knowing you are making one.
 -- Jonathan Shewchuk, CS teacher at Berkeley

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that 
aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!
 -- John Carmack

Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
 -- Alan Jay Perlis (CS)

Optimization hinders evolution.
 -- Alan Jay Perlis

Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be 
taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers.
 -- Alan Jay Perlis

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. 
Geniuses remove it.
 -- Alan Jay Perlis

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in 
God.
 -- Alan Jay Perlis

When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only 
say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
 -- Alan Jay Perlis

Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy 
to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
 -- Alan Jay Perlis

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to 
program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in 
organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be 
self-critical?
 -- Alan Jay Perlis

In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way.
 -- Alan Jay Perlis

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
 -- Don Knuth

Premature generalization is the other root of all evil.
 -- Keith Rarick

Written by a C++ developer with Stockholm Syndrome: "Complex programming 
problems require complex languages."
 -- @agentdero

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round 
one.
 -- Douglas Crockford, to Dave Winer, about JSON vs. XML

Probably my job description would be just to find something to make life 
better. Or have some new idea of new stuff that replaces old stuff. Try 
to make it better. Whatever it is that's wrong, that takes time, that 
causes bugs.
 -- Ken Thompson (at Google)

[C++] does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of 
ideas that are mutually exclusive.
 -- Ken Thompson

I have determined that the complexity class of most C++ programs is 
NP-Fucked.
 -- Joël Perras (@jperras)

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you'll 
have to answer fucking fish questions the rest of your life.
 -- Steve Harris (Terracotta)

It's funny, but I used to get really pissed off at Larry Wall for 
calling Java programmers "babies". It turns out the situation is a 
little more complicated than that... but only a little.
 -- Steve Yegge

I am very interested in obsoleting GNU bloatware: it's crap. From a 
purely technical perspective, the FSF _sucks_at_writing_code_. They're 
horrible, and their stuff should die. That's why I got into BusyBox in 
the first place: I want GNU-less Linux.
 -- Rob Landley

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. 
Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.
 -- John Carmack

Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces 
can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile 
them up endlessly.
 -- Steve Yegge

I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the 
world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces. The essence of 
user interfaces is parsing: converting an unstructured sequence of 
commands, in a format usually determined more by psychology than by 
solid engineering, into structured data. [...] This situation is a 
recipe for disaster.
 -- Dan Bernstein

The Internet isn't really a technology, it's a belief system - a 
philosophy. [...] The belief system of the Internet is that everyone 
should have the freedom to connect, the freedom to innovate and the 
freedom to hack without asking permission. No one can know the whole of 
it; it cannot be centrally controlled and the innovation happens in 
small groups on the "edges" of the network.
 -- Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab)

It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and 
try to figure out whether to try something. [...] The compass has 
replaced the map and the idea of "rough consensus running code" has 
spread from the ideology behind network architecture to a fundamental 
philosophy for startup companies and the "lean startup" movement.
 -- Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab)

Hobbyists are the ones who invent new stuff, almost exclusively. [...] A 
thousand professional physicists picked at random probably wouldn't 
fundamentally change physics the way Albert Einstein did as a hobby 
while working as a patent clerk. [...] Hobbyists are artists as much as 
engineers. They get writer's block. They have portfolio pieces showing 
cool things they've done, which are generally more interesting than 
their resume listing experience and training. Hobbyists go off on 
tangents ALL THE TIME, that's how they come up with new stuff nobody's 
ever done before, with sturgeon's law in full force: 90% of that new 
stuff is crap, but a tiny fraction of it is spectacular. [...] A 
hobbyist generally responds to "What's it good for?" with "Let's find 
out!".
 -- Rob Landley

In the physical world, an engineer’s job is to build a project to spec. 
But in the world of software, sometimes it’s the case that you start 
building a bridge, then halfway through realize what you really need is 
a boat. As developers, we can make that switch because software is, 
well, soft.
 -- Adam Wiggins (CTO, Heroku)

It's too easy to fall out of touch with the code when you're managing a 
product from a higher level. When you don't understand the code, you 
won't understand why a change takes as long as it does, or how to 
increase the speed of change. The code affects long term flexibility 
too. If the code is hard to change, a feature will be hard to change. 
That's a product level issue.
 -- Ryan Singer (37signals)

People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a 
year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a 
year.
 -- Peter Drucker, quoted by Chad Dickerson (Etsy)

It is nice to know the dictionary definition for the adjective "elegant" 
in the meaning "simple and surprisingly effective".
 -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and 
education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells 
better. The computing industry is not the only one that has discovered 
that sore truth: so has the academic world. If you deliver a lecture 
that is crystal clear from the beginning to end, your audience feels 
cheated and mutters while leaving the lecture hall "That was all rather 
trivial, wasn't it?". One of our learned journals has rejected a 
beautiful paper of mine because the solution it presented was too simple 
to be of academic interest and I am waiting for the rejection of a paper 
on the grounds that it is too short.
 -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

He is someone extraordinarily gifted, able to tackle any mathematical or 
even scientific problem, and most people with these qualities tend not 
to focus. Gérard Berry, schockingly, kept focused on his research topic 
(synchronous systems) from the day he knew that was it. It was not easy 
at first, nobody took him seriously.
 -- Jean Vuillemin

The art of programming is the skill of controlling complexity.
 -- Marijn Haverbeke (Eloquent JavaScript)

Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.
 -- Mike Tyson, quoted by Adam Wiggins

The plan was (a) to make a crappy initial version of Arc, (b) use that 
for a while in real applications, then (c) go back and write a complete, 
cleaned up language spec, and (d) use that as the basis of a fairly good 
implementation.
 -- Paul Graham

I dislike "flag" arguments that are intended to change the behavior of a 
method in some big way. [...] The call would be more readable if the API 
had separate methods: one for each flag value.
 -- Guido van Rossum

Entreprise-friendly is usually when the really smart people lose 
interest and the people of more mediocre skills have to somehow fend for 
themselves.
 -- Guido van Rossum

There is no contemporary problems requiring millions of lines of code. 
Instead there are careless programmers, bad managers, or impossible 
requirements for compatibility.
 -- Chuck Moore

[When asked: "How do you define success in terms of your work?"]
An elegant solution.
 -- Chuck Moore

I'm amazed that software written in the 1970s hasn't/can't be rewritten. 
One reason might be that in those days software was exciting; things 
being done for the first time; programmers working 18-hour days for the 
joy of it. Now programming is a 9-5 job as part of a team working to a 
schedule; not much fun.
 -- Chuck Moore

Lisp did not address I/O. In fact, C did not address I/O and because it 
didn't, it needed an operating system. Forth addressed I/O from the very 
beginning.
 -- Chuck Moore

The critical skill grad students have to master is noticing something so 
obvious that no one else has noticed it before.
 -- Matt Might

I think the root of your mistake is saying that macros don't scale to 
larger groups. The real truth is that macros don't scale to stupider 
groups.
 -- Paul Graham

Two ranchers, a Canadian and an American, meet at a Cattle Convention. 
The American boasts “My ranch is so big, I can git’ in my truck and 
drive for a day in any direction, and I’m still on ma’ propuh-ty.”
The Canadian nods in sympathy. “I used to have a truck just like that.”
 -- Raganwald

Avoid OO whenever possible. Contrary to common belief, most problems are 
better solved in non-OO ways.
 -- Anselm R. Garbe

Some people, when confronted with a reliability problem, think, “I know, 
I’ll build a distributed system.” Now they have n² problems.
 -- Keith Rarick

Simplicity is often in tension with convenience. Convenience often wins 
in the short term, but simplicity always wins in the long term. The real 
trick is finding a way to get both simplicity and convenience. That is 
the secret sauce and it’s SO worth the effort.
 -- Keith Rarick

Python is not a functional language dfor a very good reason: Python is 
very pragmatic. It lets you mess around with state, fiddle with the 
OS... All kinds of things that you can very easily do in Python, but 
somehow are incredibly hard in a beautiful language like Haskell.
 -- Guido Van Rossum

My opinion is that OOP is one of the great frauds perpetrated on the 
community.
 -- Peter Weinberger

I'd say Kernighan emphasized ease of learning; Weinberger, soundness of 
implementation; and I, utility.
 -- Alfred Aho (on AWK)

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that as a programmer either I am 
trying to decide what to do next, or I am debugging. Everything else 
takes hardly any time.
 -- Peter Weinberger

The best path to high-quality software is talented experts who share a 
pretty clear sense of what they want to produce. I have no idea how to 
produce good software without talented programmers.
 -- Peter Weinberger

I usually consider that if something needs comments, it is not well 
written. For me, a comment is almost a note like "I should try to 
rewrite this code later." I think clear code is much more readable than 
commented code.
 -- Roberto Ierusalimschy

Design for minimal resources, and you may be pleasantly surprised to see 
your tool used in many contexts that you did not have as a primary goal 
and some that you did not even know existed. When we discuss the 
inclusion of a feature in Lua, we ask ourselves: "OK, but will it run in 
a microwave oven?"
 -- Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo

The effect of individual differences will far outweigh any effect of the 
programming language [on productivity].
 -- Tom Love

If I revisited [Objective-C] today, I might even go as far as to remove 
[inheritance]. Inheritance just isn't all that important. Encapsulation 
is OOP's lasting contribution.
 -- Brad Cox

I'm focused on SOA and JBI today. They support encapsulation as much as 
traditional OOP. Even better; they encapsulate not just data + 
procedures, but even the entire thread of control that powers them.
 -- Brad Cox

The big change was ubiquitous networking, which opened up new levels of 
integration larger than the Unix process space. In SOA for example, the 
Internet is like the cabling between the components of a HiFi system, 
with services on disparate servers functioning like the components 
themselves.
 -- Brad Cox

[We had] exactly the problem gate-level designers face when designing 
big chips. Their solution? Encapsulate a bunch of gates inside a chip. 
I'll handle chip design. You solder them together. Objective-C was 
precisely that notion. Of course [...] languages are tools, things to be 
picked up or laid aside according to the problem at hand.
 -- Brad Cox

It's all about doing more with less. It's not about doing more with more 
with a simple layer on top.
 -- Anders Hejlsberg

Unfortunately, RUP became understood as a prescriptive methodology like 
cooking food. None of us who have developed software would even dream 
that you really do it step by step, following a checklist.
 -- Ivar Jacobson

The industry is very immature. It's a little more mature than it was 20 
years ago, but we build much more complex systems today.
 -- Ivar Jacobson

Unfortunately, a lot of people who were jealous of our initial success 
got involved in the second version. They felt they could have done just 
as well as we did. As things turned out, they couldn't. [...] So UML 2.0 
became a bloated monstruosity. [...] It shows the limitations of trying 
to do creative activity by commitee.
 -- James Rumbaugh

The sad thing is that most of the problems [Brooks] cites in [The 
Mythical Man-Month] are still happening today. [...] Maybe this is a 
good way to state the main problem facing the computing field: most of 
its practitioners have no understanding of computing history and so 
[...] they are condemned to repeat the same mistakes.
 -- James Rumbaugh

I think [using UML to generate implementation code] is a terrible idea. 
[...] If you can generate code from a model, then it is a programming 
language. And UML is not a well-designed programming language.
 -- James Rumbaugh

Don't believe the nonsense about inventing a better mousetrap: it takes 
serious marketing to get something adopted.
 -- James Rumbaugh (about concurrent programming languages)

Perl 5 made much the same mistake that languages like Ruby are currently 
making with monkey typing (sic), [...] which results in spookey 
action-at-a-distance.
 -- Larry Wall

[Computers] really don't understand when they should ask for feedback. 
That's because they don't understand when they should be unsure.
 -- Larry Wall

When OOP came onto the scene and most people said it is what comes after 
structured methods, to me that made no sense. It was part of structured 
methods right from the beginning. Structured programming was for 
programming-in-the-small aspects, and OOP was for 
programming-in-the-large, but there was no gap between the two. Having 
read Dahl's and Hoare's text, I knew this was the right way to program.
 -- Bertrand Meyer

I have never seen a breakthrough product in software that was built by 
more than 10 people, and usually it is somewhere between 2 and 5.
 -- Bertrand Meyer

Nowadays, most of the code written has an inheritance structure, which 
is encouraged in the hope that it will bring clarity to the code. 
However [...] this is not beautiful code; it is bad code with a 
convoluted design. If you cannot tell what the code does by glancing at 
the naming conventions and several code lines, then the code is too 
complicated.
 -- Adam Kolawa

Bill Gosper once said: "Data is just a dumb kind of programming." The 
corollary, of course, is that code is just a smart kind of data, data 
designed to trigger processors into performing certain useful or amusing 
acts.
 -- Charles Petzold

Is the lack of [runtime type checking] good enough to be called 
"beautiful code"? After working with it for over five years, yes, I 
think it is. It keeps easy hacks from springing up within the kernel and 
forces everyone to be very exact in their logic, never falling back on 
any checks for types that might prevent bugs from happening later.
 -- Greg Kroah-Hartman

Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of 
indirection, but that usually will create another problem.
 -- David Wheeler

[Unix is] an operating system designed primarily for technical users 
[that] know better than OS designers what their own needs are.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

The Unix philosophy is bottom-up, not top down. It is pragmatic and 
grounded in experience. It is not to be found in official methods and 
standards, but rather in the implicit hard-reflexive knowledge, the 
expertise that the Unix culture transmits.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
 -- Brian Kernighan

The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to 
hold its global complexity down, to build it out of simple parts 
connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local 
and you can have some hope of upgrading a part without breaking the 
whole.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Hardwiring policy and mechanism together has two bad effects: it makes 
policy rigid and harder to change in response to user requirements, and 
it means that trying to change policy has a strong tendency to 
destabilize the mechanisms.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

The original HTML documents recommend "be generous in what you accept", 
and it has bedeviled us ever since because each browser accepts a 
different superset of the specifications. It is the specifications that 
should be generous, not their interpretation.
 -- Doug McIlroy

Make it run, then make it right, then make it fast.
 -- Kent Beck

Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only 
error to have ruined more designs than feature creep.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

I remember one development manager at Bellcore who fought against the 
"requirements" culture years before anybody talked about "rapid 
prototyping" or "agile development". He wouldn't issue long 
specifications; he'd lash together some combination of shell scripts and 
awk code that did roughly what was needed, [have] the customers [...] 
tell him whether or not they liked it. If they did, he would say "you 
can have it industrial strength so-many-months from now at such-and-such 
cost". His estimates tended to be accurate, but he lost out in the 
culture to managers who believed that requirements writers should be in 
control of everything.
 -- Mike Lesk

The Unix tradition includes a healthy distrust of "one true way" 
approaches to software design or implementation. It embraces multiple 
languages, open extensible systems, and customization hooks everywhere.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

When you see the right thing, do it. This may look like more work in the 
short term, but it's the path of least effort in the long run. If you 
don't know what the right thing is, do the minimum necessary to get the 
job done, at least until you figure out what the right thing is.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Later, [PDP-10 hackers] became the founding cadre of the IETF and 
originated the tradition of standardization through RFCs. Socially, they 
were young, exceptionally bright, almost entirely male, dedicated to the 
point of addiction, and tended to have streaks of stubborn 
nonconformism. [They] had a vision of computers as community-building 
devices.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

The pipe was technically trivial, but profound in its effect. However, 
it would not have been trivial without the fundamental unifying notion 
of the process as an autonomous unit of computation, with process 
control being programmable.
 -- Doug McIlroy

The day Linux gives the Mac diagnostic that you can't open a file 
because you don't have the application is the day Linux becones 
non-Unix.
 -- Doug McIlroy

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One is to make it 
so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other is to make 
it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first 
method is far more difficult.
 -- C.A.R. Hoare

Doug McIlroy's advice to "do one thing well" is usually interpreted as 
being about simplicity. But it is also, implicitly and at least as 
importantly, about orthogonality.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

One single bug-prone glue layer is not the worst fate that can befall a 
design. A designer who is aware that the glue layer exists, and tries to 
organize it into a middle layer around its own set of data structures or 
objects, can end up with *two* levels of glue: one above the midlayer 
and one below.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of 
excessive layering.
 -- Eric S. Raymond
 
There is more vocal criticism of OO in the Unix world than orthodoxy 
permits elsewhere; Unix programmers know when *not* to use OO; and when 
they do use OO languages, they spend more effort trying to keep their 
object designs uncluttered.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Commercial Unix distributions that have [suppressed] the BUGS section or 
[euphemized it] have invariably fallen into decline.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Using the Unix file system as a database is a tactic other applications 
with simple database requirements might do well to emulate. Good reasons 
not to do it are more likely to have to do with the database keys not 
naturally looking like filenames than they are with any performance 
problems.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

If you want transparent code, the most effective route is simply not to 
layer too much abstraction over what you are manipulating with the code.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence 
simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a 
structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the 
other?
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Threading is a performance hack. [They] do not reduce global complexity 
but rather increase it, and should therefore be avoided save under dire 
necessity.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

If you can use limited shared memory and semaphores, asynchronous I/O 
using SIGIO or poll/select rather than threading, do it that way.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

[The Unix tradition of program interface design] has an inner logic to 
it which is worth learning and understanding. It reflects heuristics 
accumulated over Unix's long history about ways to do effective 
communication both with human beings and with other programs.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Consider your tradeoffs carefully, and consider them from the user's 
point of view. The bias implied by the Rule of Least Surprise is a good 
one to hold consciously, mainly because interface designers have an 
unconscious tendency to be too clever for the user's good.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

The design of consumer software [since 1984 has] become heavily skewed 
toward GUIs. While this is a good choice for novice and casual users 
that constitute most of the market, it also exacts hidden costs on more 
expert users.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Programs should request confirmation only when there is good reason to 
suspect that the answer might be "no no no!"
 -- Eric S. Raymond

Reading profiler results is something of an art. There are a couple 
(sic) of recurring problems: one is instrumentation noise, another is 
the effect of imposed external latencies, and a third is overweighting 
of upper nodes in the call graph.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

The MIT and New Jersey philosophies have analogs within the Unix design 
tradition itself. One strain of Unix thinking emphasizes small sharp 
tools, starting designs from zero and interfaces that are simple and 
consistent. This point of view has been most famously championed by Doug 
McIlroy. Another strain emphasizes doing simple implementations that 
work and that ship quickly, even if the methods are brute-force and some 
edge cases have been punted. Ken Thompson's code and his maxims about 
programming have often seemed to lean in this direction. The tension 
between these approaches arises precisely because one can sometimes get 
a simpler interface if one is willing to pay implementation complexity 
for it, or vice versa.
 -- Eric S. Raymond

You can cut accidental complexity by noticing that there is a simpler 
way to do things. You can cut optional complexity by making 
context-dependent judgements about what features are worthwhile. You can 
only cut essential complexity by having an epiphany, fundamentally 
redefining the problem you are addressing.
 -- Eric S. Raymond
 
The reason that vi and emacs never caught on among old-school Unix 
programmers is that they are *ugly*. This complaint may be "old Unix" 
speaking, but had it not been for the singular taste of old Unix, "new 
Unix" would not exist.
 -- Doug McIlroy

My ideal for the future is to develop a filesystem remote interface (a 
la Plan 9) and then have it implemented across the Internet as the 
standard rather than HTML. The would be ultimate cool.
 -- Ken Thompson

This is why you spent all that time learning to program: you can fix 
things. You can make new and amazing things. Don't take that ability 
lightly.
 -- James Hague

In many ways, the end result is unimportant – it’s really just the 
excuse for the whole experience. It’s why I started Linux to begin with 
– sure, I kind of needed an OS, but I needed a *project* to work on more 
than I needed the OS. [...] My model is kind of a reverse “end result 
justifies the means”. Hell no, that’s the stupidest saying in the 
history of man. [...] It’s simply not the end that matters at all. It’s 
the means – the journey. The end result is almost meaningless.
 -- Linus Torvalds

I've never found the idea of depending on a huge C++ library 
particularly attractive for my projects. Admittedly, I _do_ have an 
aversion to 'enterprise-level' programming.
 -- Mike Pall

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
 -- Isaac Asimov

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a 
simple system that worked.
 -- John Gall

I think I've been able to reach my goals on the internet better than 
most people. The fact that I'm very clear about my opinions is probably 
part of it. I hate that whole "victim philosophy". The truth shouldn't 
be sugarcoated.
 -- Linus Torvalds

For those of you who think we have been engaged in steady progress, in 
some form of Darwinian process that are making things better for us, 
it's actually quite the opposite.
 -- Alan Kay

Technology happens, it's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?
 -- Andrew Grove

Startup advice overheard: you have too many hipsters, you won't scale 
like that. Hire some fat guys who know C++.
 -- Jay Kreps (LinkedIn)

We should have some ways of coupling programs like garden hose--screw in 
another segment when it becomes necessary to massage data in another 
way. This is the way of IO also.
 -- Doug McIlroy

Perhaps I'm a philistine about types but I've never found that model 
particularly expressive.
 -- Rob Pike

The following data structures are a complete list for almost all 
practical programs: array, linked list, hash table, binary tree.
 -- Rob Pike

Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized 
things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data 
structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.
 -- Rob Pike

Algorithms, or details of algorithms, can often be encoded compactly, 
efficiently and expressively as data. [...] Code and data are the same, 
or at least they can be. How else can you explain how a compiler works?
 -- Rob Pike

I think you have to open the objects and open your methods. I think that 
this idea of hiding in layers of abstraction everything about the 
details has, in fact, pretty much run its course now. I think the idea 
that we can make these sorts of black box devices that we only know 
about the shell of and have no knowledge of the internal workings of is 
in fact a deep mistake. Because it turns out that in order to be able to 
reason about how the system is actually working, we have to have 
knowledge about what is inside the black box.
 -- Richard Cook (on resilience of complex systems)

Well, I'm an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in history. 
The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing 
not-quite-a-field.
 -- Alan Kay

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural 
resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was 
man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was 
so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by 
amateurs.
 -- Alan Kay

Tell everyone your startup idea. [...] The idea thief has no passion.
 -- Rob Walling

People like Leibniz and Babbage and Lovelace and Turing and von Neumann 
understood from the beginning that a computer wouldn't just be another 
steam engine or toaster -- that, because of the property of universality 
(whether or not they called it that), it's difficult even to talk about 
computers without also talking about ourselves.
 -- Scott Aaronson

When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
 -- Steve Haflich

Beginner: "Threads are hard." Intermediate: "Don't fear multithreading." 
Expert: "Threads are hard."
 -- Damien Katz

The only reason to have unit tests is to make sure that code that 
already works doesn’t break. Writing tests first, or writing code to the 
tests is ridiculous. If you write to the tests before the code, you 
won’t even know what the edge cases are.
 -- Chad Okere

What children do well and adults forget about: constantly testing 
boundaries.
 -- Subbu Allamaraju

Only ugly languages become popular. Python is the one exception.
 -- Knuth

If you believe "pragmatism" and "theory" are in opposition, you 
understand neither.
 -- Paul Snively

Simplifying code is like diet and exercise: the result is healthy and 
runs faster. Loop unrolling is plastic surgery: the result does not age 
well and winds up making things _worse_ after a while. Don't optimize. 
Simplify.
 -- Rob Landley

A way to handle design vs. implementation is to see the work as 
components. Design is the boundaries, implementation is the contents.
 -- Ryan Singer

When I was a young Erik, when I was a fundamentalist functional 
programmer, I would say: "Of course, you're using mutable state, you 
should not do that! Use Haskell or a real language and this won't 
happen." But OTOH, now that I write code for a living, I kind of like 
imperative programming. You can get stuff done, you know... The Real 
World is imperative, so I think we need to embrace side effects.
 -- Erik Meijer

Functional "programming" is a tool for thought. Imperative programming 
is a tool for hackers.
 -- Erik Meijer

Don't ever let anyone tell you that fork(2) is bad. Thirty years from 
now, there will still be a fork(2) and a pipe(2) and a exec(2) and smart 
people will still be using them to solve hard problems reliably and 
predictably, just like they were thirty years ago.
 -- Ryan Tomayko

These days I write code because (and when) I enjoy it and I think it'll 
be useful to me or to my fellow hackers; if I decide I'd enjoy something 
else more, I'll do that instead.  The new users can go and fuck 
themselves.
 -- Daniel Barlow

First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of 
abstraction, then you're ready to engineer.
 -- Kent Beck

Our job is not just making things. Believe it or not, that's the easy 
part. Our job is to figure out whether something should be made, how 
it's made and convice someone, whether that's a client, a co-worker, a 
manager or a VC, that we've made the right choice. That's design.
 -- Mike Monteiro

Dependency hygiene trumps code reuse.
 -- Rob Pike

Erlang is the culmination of twenty-five years of correct design 
decisions in the language and platform. Whenever I've wondered about how 
something in Erlang works, I have never disappointed in the answer. I 
almost always leave with the impression that the designers did the 
“right thing.” I suppose this is in contrast to Java, which does the 
pedantic thing, Perl, which does the kludgy thing, Ruby, which has two 
independent implementations of the wrong thing, and C, which doesn't do 
anything.
 -- Evan Miller

It's pretty easy to spot that something is not flexible enough. Spotting 
that it is too flexible can take years.
 -- Martin Sustrik

0.01: The factor of human beings who can program
0.001: The factor of human beings who can program concurrently
0.0001: The factor of human beings who can program distributively
 -- Jesper Louis Andersen

Sometimes correctness trumps speed. Sometimes it is the other way around.
 -- Jesper Louis Andersen

Idempotence is your key to network programming.
Protocol design is your key to network programming.
Sun RPC is usually not the solution. Corollary: HTTP requests neither.
 -- Jesper Louis Andersen

In a distributed system, the important part is the messages. What 
happens inside a given node is uninteresting. Especially what 
programming language it is written in.
 -- Jesper Louis Andersen

There is something very American about Feynman breaking into safes 
during the Manhattan Project. It's hard to imagine the authorities 
having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time. 
Maybe it's not a coincidence.
Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the 
essence of Americanness. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in 
America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those 
countries, people color inside the lines.
 -- Paul Graham

We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus 
and running code.
 -- David Clark, IETF

I'd like to stand for simplicity in Programming Languages. The key thing 
to remember is that a PL is a tool, and that the users of that tool need 
to master it. So the average programmer using a language should know and 
understand the entire language.
 -- David MacQueen, Milner Symposium 2012

Make new developers do code reviews.
 -- Alex Gaynor

The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how 
its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and 
behaviors should be.
 -- Alan Kay

A wise person knows when to ignore his duties and improvise. Rules and 
incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a 
downwards spiral that makes them worse in the long run.
 -- Barry Schwartz

Who is the CEO? The one bringing vision and culture.
 -- Le Camping

The world moves forward on those who are dissidents. Because without 
dissent there is no creativity.
 -- Steve Blank

- How long to develop this feature?
- How long does it take to catch a fish?
 -- @freekl, Twitter

Google has found that the most innovative workers — also the “happiest,” 
by its definition — are those who have a strong sense of mission about 
their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.
 -- Steve Lohr (New York Times)

We are defined by what we make time to do, not by what we do when we 
have time.
 -- Kate Matsudaira

What I cannot create, I do not understand.
 -- Richard Feynman

[Nothing lasts. Nothing is finished. Nothing is perfect.] Accepting the 
world as imperfect, unfinished, and transient, and then going deeper and 
celebrating that reality, is something not unlike freedom.
 -- Richard Powell on Wabi Sabi

Not all products can be the hero. Some play supporting roles. Some have 
bit parts. People need to understand your character’s role. It can’t 
have too many dimensions. Choose wisely. Don’t confuse. Don’t be too 
greedy.
 -- Ev Williams

In most languages, an array with n elements normally has those elements 
numbered with subscripts ranging from 1 to n inclusive. Not so in C.
 -- Andrew Koenig

It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a 
randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way 
that delivers better performance but requires more thought.
 -- E.T. Jaynes

If you don't respect inherent complexity, you create accidental complexity.
 -- David Herman

You know what architecture is? It is the art of drawing lines.
 -- Uncle Bob Martin

It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you 
have a reasonable attack. [...] Most great scientists know many 
important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important 
problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a 
new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this 
problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it.
 -- Richard Hamming

The copyright industry is digging a grave for the Internet. They don't 
take into account the public benefits of a free Internet. The problem 
is that old people are running the companies. They know how you made 
money before and they don't want to change. They're like the Amish: 
they don't want electricity, they know how to make do without 
electricity.
 -- Peter Sunde

I think software is getting worse and worse and worse with time. It's 
not that we cannot do amazing things with computers, we can! But when
they don't work, we don't understand why they don't work. In the past,
when you had a program that didn't work, you can look at it. Now, you
ask Google.
 -- Joe Armstrong

Sometimes, changing one line of legacy code is as difficult as
rewriting the entire thing. But management doesn't think that.
 -- Joe Armstrong

The notion that you can have data consistent in two different places
break the laws of physics (causality). Despite this fact, we build
systems with 2PC and forget about it.
 -- Joe Armstrong

The key to a design methodology is being able to split computations 
into completely independent parts. If you manage to solve your problem
by dividing it into independent parts, you can get both fault tolerance
and scalability. I don't agree [...] that you can either get fault
tolerance or scalability. You can only get both or none of them.
 -- Joe Armstrong

When I learnt programming, everybody said we should have defensive
programming, we should check our arguments all the time. Defensive
programming in C is only necessary because you have a single thread of
computation. If you have a sequential language and it crashes, you've
lost everything.
 -- Joe Armstrong

The process approach to fault isolation advocates that the process 
software be fail-fast. It should either function correctly or it should 
detect the fault, signal failure and stop operating.
 -- Jim Gray

I really disagree with Postel's principle. [...] You shouldn't be 
lenient with your inputs. If your inputs are completely cracked you 
should just stop immediatly.
 -- Joe Armstrong

History and debugging are both about uncovering causality from precedence.
 -- Gérard Berry

If you think that time is sequence, you lose half of the game.
 -- Gérard Berry

There are two opposite ways to build systems: hack them, test them, and 
hope they work, or think about them and use well-defined tools.
 -- Gérard Berry

Anything added dilutes everything else.
 -- GitHub Zen

I get grumpy and mad and frustrated reading poor quality patches all 
the time. [...] If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that 
means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something 
wrong.
 -- Greg Kroah-Hartman

To me, the fundamental outcome of research is understanding, and the 
fundamental outcome of engineering is a product.
 -- Fred Baker

Don’t ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something 
better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel 
trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence 
much too much credit.
 -- Linus Torvalds

[Saying] "the brain is not a computer" [is] akin to saying "applesauce 
is not an apple." Technically that statement is true, but you can make 
applesauce from an apple. Perhaps more to the point, it is like saying 
"computers are not word processors". [A] computer can become a brain if 
it is running brain software.
 -- Ray Kurzweil

We each need a leap of faith as to what and who is conscious, and who 
and what we are as conscious beings. Otherwise we could not get up in 
the morning. But we should be honest about the fundamental need for a 
leap of faith in this matter and self-reflective as to what our own 
particular leap involves.
 -- Ray Kurzweil

There's a reason computer history is a hobby of mine, I want to know 
_why_ we do things.
 -- Rob Landley

What moved a lot of engineers into product is frustration with the 
silliness. [...] I was really excited because I thought agile was a 
revolution by the developers to stop the insanity. Unfortunately, I 
think the business types outsmarted all of us. They basically pushed a 
spec into the basement and said: "You know, you can do your standups, 
you can have fun, do whatever you want! But here's your roadmap." [...] 
And it is true that [most agile teams] move a little faster, but the 
results don't get better.
 -- Marty Cagan

After folding my first company (at 25), I did a retrospective and 
counted 32 different projects — most of them, whole new products or 
product variations — I’d started (and almost never completed) in the 
prior year. I realized this may have had something to do with my 
failure.
 -- Ev Williams

When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is 
how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of 
its own complexity.
 -- James Hague

OH: "Yes, it's flexible. Like rope."
 -- Brad Fitzpatrick

Merely adding features does not make it easier for users to do things, 
it just makes the manual thicker.
 -- Pike & Kernighan (Program design in the UNIX environment)

First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of 
abstraction, then you're ready to engineer.
 -- Kent Beck

Originally I was going to program twttr in Python, C, & Ocaml. But, I 
got @florian who was a core contributor to Ruby on Rails.
 -- Jack Dorsey

Humans fundamentally understand atomicity. [...] They understand that 
the state of the world is always changing and they deal with it. [...] 
People who are not technical are smarter than we give them credit for. 
They understand the nature of the world is that there are not as many 
guarantees in a lot of things that they do, and they are forgiving of 
certain kinds of errors.
 -- Camille Fournier

How many of you [wouldn't] want to hire someone on their team if they 
didn't know the [framework] magic already?
 -- Greg Young

I have witnessed numerous occasions where an inordinately expensive 
query was made 8-times faster by parallelizing... where the trivial 
refactoring into a slimmed down algorithm with proper data structures 
would have speed the code up by 100-fold. Parallelizing a piggy piece 
of code to make it faster merely uses more of the machine to get the 
same job done, and will negatively impact power, resource management, 
and utilization.
 -- Joe Duffy

An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should 
never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator 
Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
 -- Mitch Hedberg, stand-up comedian

Software is a gas. It expands to fill its container.
 -- Nathan Myhrvold's Law on bloat

Hardware is like milk: you want the freshest possible. Software is like
wine, it becomes better with age.
 -- Paul Mockapetris

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. 
But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.
 -- Steve Jobs

N'attendre de l’État que deux choses : liberté, sécurité, et bien voir 
qu'on ne saurait, au risque de les perdre toutes deux, en demander une 
troisième.
 -- Frédéric Bastiat

Does comment on taste belong in a discussion of history? I think so. 
Unix was born of a taste for achieving big power by small means rather 
than by unbounded accumulation of facilities. But evolution, including 
the evolution of Unix, does not work that way. An interesting question 
is how the corrective of taste manages ever to recenter the exuberance 
of evolution. The birth of Unix shows it can happen. When will it 
happen again?
 -- Doug McIlroy

That's what a professional does: a professional takes the risk on what 
they know must be done.
 -- Uncle Bob Martin

Les socialistes croient à deux choses qui sont absolument 
contradictoires : la liberté et l'organisation.
 -- Elie Halévy

Le socialisme est le fantastique frère cadet du despotisme presque 
défunt, dont il veut recueillir l’héritage ; ses efforts sont donc, au 
sens le plus profond, réactionnaires.
 -- Nietzsche

Les socialistes ont eu tort de venir au pouvoir. Ils auraient dû faire 
comme Dieu : ne jamais se montrer pour qu'on continue à y croire.
 -- Coluche

Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the 
wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all 
the principle of laissez-faire capitalism.
 -- Hayek

 If you build someone a fire, you'll keep them warm for a night. If you 
set someone on fire, you'll keep them warm for the rest of their life.
 -- Terry Pratchett

Alas! the day cometh when man shall no longer shoot the arrow of his 
desire beyond man, when his bowstring shall have forgotten its use! I 
say unto you: a man must have chaos yet within him to be able to give 
birth to a dancing star.
 -- Nietzsche

The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is so complicated. We 
practice witchcraft. [...] William of Occam was a 13th century monk. He 
can't help us now, Bernard. He would have burned us at the stake.
 -- Dr. Robert Ford, Westworld

Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti 
code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. Large 
organizations always tend to develop software this way, and I expect 
this to be as true in a hundred years as it is today.
 -- Paul Graham

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave 
themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are 
indistinguishable from it.
 -- Marc Weiser, Xerox Parc

I'm more inclined to work with someone who wants to build a company of 
the right size than with someone who wants to build the right thing.
 -- Michael Bernstein

Why do people keep thinking that having awesome support is the best 
option? *Not needing support in the first place* is the best option. 
Having support doesn't solve the time spent, blocking time wasted, etc. 
That's time I can't get back. I want your thing to just work.
 -- Nick Craver

Universal step 1 of becoming an awesome <insert profession>: care.
 -- Nick Craver

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with 
the average voter.
 -- Winston Churchill

Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to 
be very selective about who it decides to make friends with.
 -- Unknown Author

A firewall is the simplest, most effective means to secure a database. 
Sounds complicated, but it’s so easy a government agent could do it.
 -- DataStax

The older I get, the less I care about making tech decisions right and 
the more I care about retaining the ability to change a wrong one.
 -- David Brady

Complex algorithms are used only if their complexity can be localized.
 -- Ken Thompson (on Unix kernel)

Modern invention has been a great leveller. A machine may operate far 
more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege 
and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance.
 -- Ivor Brown

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
 -- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

There is no compression algorithm for experience.
 -- Werner Vogels (about Amazon hiring engineers in their 60s)

The meaning of my work is the motivation that is of the purest – money. 
What I did for Playboy is very good and your payment is equal to the 
task.
 -- Salvador Dali

Machine learning is like money laundering for bias.
 -- Maciej Ceglowski

Anyone who has ever debugged programs in both compiled and interpreted 
languages (e.g., C versus Java) knows they are miles apart. A good VM 
makes the language safe, in the sense that errors can always be 
understood in terms of the language itself, not in term of the 
underlying machine (e.g., segmentation fault).
 -- Roberto Ierusalimschy

This is a two-way street. The implementation has a huge impact on the 
[design of the software]: we should not design what we cannot implement 
efficiently.
 -- Roberto Ierusalimschy

There is a difference between designing in a way that allows for future 
change and attempting to predict the future. [...] Code should be 
designed based on what you know now, not on what you think will happen 
in the future.
 -- Max Kanat-Alexander

Nearly all decisions in software design reduce entirely to measuring 
the future value of a change versus its effort of maintenance. [...] It 
is more important to reduce the effort of maintenance than it is to 
reduce the effort of implementation.
 -- Max Kanat-Alexander

Comments should explain why the code is doing something, not what it is 
doing.
 -- Max Kanat-Alexander

When presented with complexity, ask: “What problem are you trying to 
solve?”
 -- Max Kanat-Alexander


My rule of thumb was when a problem was occurring at least 50 times a 
day, it was time to solve it more holistically. [...] If you don’t 
solve problems manually first, you could lose crucial insights into 
what’s causing a problem and why.
 -- Jonathan Golden

From Ruby to Mongo, MySQL to Node successful open source is usually the 
fun and easy thing to get started with.
 -- Peter van Hardenberg‏

Make sure you know what's inside the box before trying to think outside 
of it.
 -- @iamdevloper

We think awful code is written by awful devs. But in reality, it's 
written by reasonable devs in awful circumstances.
 -- Sarah Mei

The benefit of dependencies is inversely proportional to the amount of 
effort spent on a software project.
 -- Eli Bendersky

The work of engineers used to be about taking small parts that they 
understood entirely and using simple techniques to compose them into 
larger things that do what they want. But programming now isn't so much 
like that. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or 
nonexistent man pages for software you don't know who wrote. You have 
to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out 
different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a 
fundamentally different job.
 -- Gerald Sussman

- What happened (what were the symptoms)?
- What did we do as an immediate workaround?
- What was the damage (and what do we need to do to make up for it)?
- What do we have to do to ensure it never happens again?
 -- Ian Rogers

Work in complex systems is bounded by three types of constraints: 
economic, workload and safety.
If you're going to make something cheaper, you're going to make people 
work harder or less safely.
 -- Jens Rasmussen (original) + Adrian Cockroft (translation)

The only thing you learn from releasing a mediocre product early is 
that people don't like mediocre products.
 -- A Pinterest founder (on MVPs)

Core memory wiped out competing technologies (Williams tube, mercury 
delay line, etc) almost instantly and ruled for over twent years. Yet 
late in his life Forrester told me that the Whirlwind-connected 
invention he was most proud of was marginal testing: running the 
voltage up and down once a day to cause shaky vacuum tubes to fail 
during scheduled maintenance rather than randomly during operation. And 
indeed Wirlwind racked up a notable record of reliability.
 -- Doug McIlroy

"Would you rather fight one 800lb gorilla or 800 1lb gorillas that 
trust you as their parent?" is the interview question that determines 
whether you're an IC or an engineering manager.
 -- Cliff Moon

On the NPM website, they say: "What can you make with 700,000 building 
blocks?" and to me it's like: "What can you make with 10,000 kitchens?"
 -- Evan Czaplicki

Don't give your users what they ask for, give them what they want.
 -- Tom Preston-Werner (@mojombo)

So as far as I'm concerned, the discussion is about "how to work 
together DESPITE people being different". Not about trying to make 
everybody please each other. [...] Do you think you might be interested 
in *that* kind of discussion instead of the "you are abusing me" kind 
of discussion? [...] Because if you want me to "act professional", I 
can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office 
wearign a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, 
I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the 
office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the 
buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: 
people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are 
forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.
 -- Linus Torvalds (to Sarah Sharp)

The world would be a better place if more engineers, like me, hated 
technology. The stuff I design, if I'm successful, nobody will ever 
notice. Things will just work, and be self-managing.
 -- Radia Perlman

Un programme ML est essentiellement une suite de définitions récursives 
d’ordre supérieur sur des algèbres initiales, et peut donc prétendre 
sans honte au statut de développement mathématique. En fait, 
programmer, c’est juste faire des mathématiques plus précises que 
d’habitude !
 -- Gérard Huet

Vous savez à quoi on reconnaît une bonne et une mauvaise startup ? 
Toutes les mauvaises startups ont des employés qui sont persuadés que 
tout va bien. Pourquoi ? Parce que ça veut dire que les fondateurs sont 
des menteurs.
 -- Oussama Ammar

As a startup, always bias toward simple. Customers will tell you when 
your product doesn't do enough, but will never ask for fewer features 
when they stop using your product because it's too complex.
 -- Aaron Levie

Most leaders are generally great at one of three things: vision, 
operations, or coaching. Few leaders are great at two, and you can 
rarely find one that is good at all three.
 -- Jehad Affoneh

If you don't control your priorities, time estimates with dates on them 
are impossible.
"You said it'd take 10 days!"
"Yes, and when we get 10 days to work on it, it'll be done."
 -- Nick Craver

Some people work in a system, and some people work on a system. 
Developers are inherently system changers. That’s what we do. No wonder 
we’re hard to manage!
 -- jessitron

Complexity is such a bright candle for us hacker-moths.
 -– Rusty Russell

When people visit your startup, they should be surprised how few people 
you have. A visitor who walks around and is impressed by the magnitude 
of your operation is implicitly saying "Did it really take all these 
people to make that crappy product?"
 -- Paul Graham

I've encountered two main types of programmers: ex-mathematicians, and 
would-be plumbers. There are a very small number of people who can do 
both equally well, but I _tried_ to hire Fabrice Bellard for a project 
and he was BUSY.
 -- Rob Landley

The goal was to abstract away the infrastructure. We instead converted 
every application developer into an infrastructure developer.
 -- @rakyll

When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a 
little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is 
only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while 
firing your weapon. [...] If you’re not moving, the enemy gets to 
decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you’re not firing, 
the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down. [...] Fire and Motion, 
for small companies like mine, means two things. You have to have time 
on your side, and you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later 
you will win.
 -- Joel Spolsky

Si tu peux pas faire de grandes choses, fais de petites choses avec 
grandeur.
 -- Youssoupha

Je n'ai pas appris la liberté dans Marx. Il est vrai : je l'ai apprise 
dans la misère. Mais la plupart d'​entre vous ne savent pas ce que ce mot 
veut dire.
 -- Albert Camus

Notre monde n'a pas besoin d'âmes tièdes. Il a besoin de cœurs brûlants 
qui sachent faire à la modération sa juste place.
 -- Albert Camus

Consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. [...] Beware 
of my partisanship.
 -- Georges Orwell (Homage to Catalonia)

If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict 
every time. It always yields a better result.
 -- Jeff Bezos

A tool is just an opportunity with a handle. It’s just a way of 
thinking about something differently.
 -- Kevin Kelly

On ne peut s’appuyer que sur ce qui résiste.
 -- Talleyrand

In the end, exploitation pays your salary while exploration pays your 
pension. Companies that survive do both.
 -- Steve Blank

‘Why do you weep?’ a young canary said to an old canary,
‘You are better off now in a cage than you were in the fields.’
‘You were born in it,’ said the old one, ‘so I forgive you;
I was once free but now I’m in a cage and that is why I am weeping.’
 -- Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
 -- source: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/epitaph-to-laptops/

La carrière d’aujourd’hui n’est pas une échelle mais plutôt un parcours 
d’accrobranche.
 -- Samuel Path
 -- source: https://twitter.com/smlpth/status/1527915611468222464

If there's two Great Evils in the world, it's centralization and 
complexity.
 -- George Hotz
 -- source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNrTrx42DGQ

I don't separate my science and my fun. Otherwise your fun becomes 
witless and your science joyless. And then you die. Badly.
 -- @iris_IGB
 -- source: https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685795489231392768

As DHH said so well: complexity is a temporary bridge towards 
discovering simpler solutions. It is necessary for innovation, but 
needs to be removed once the picture is clear.
 -- Tobi Lutke (Shopify CEO)
 -- source: https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1717910051388637618

I would like to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we 
had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time 1000 Mozarts, 
1000 Einsteins... The solar system would be full of life and 
intelligence and energy. And we could easily support a civilization 
that large with all of the resources in the solar system!
 -- Jeff Bezos on Lex Fridman's podcast, 2023-12
 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcWqzZ3I2cY


<someone> When Rudd, Doug, Ken, Dennis, *et al* start to develop UNIX [...]
<Douglas McIlroy> Although I jumped into Unix as soon as it was born, I 
was not one of those who "start[ed] to develop it".
<Ken Thompson> unix was written in c, c was written in b, b was written 
in tmg,and doug wrote tmg. it is all his fault.
 -- TUHS Mailing List (thread: Honor declined)

Si aujourd'hui vous avez du chocolat dites merci, si demain vous avez 
un burger dites merci.
 --  Abdoul Abdouraguimov

It's easy to get startup ideas once you're good at technology. [...] 
When you look at the world you see dotted outlines around the things 
that are missing. You start to be able to see both the things that are 
missing from the technology itself, and all the broken things that 
could be fixed using it, and each one of these is a potential startup.
 -- Paul Graham, 2024 - https://paulgraham.com/google.html