If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.
if you shipped your product and you’re not ashamed of it, you’ve probably shipped too late
— Reid Hoffman
16. Use definitive, specific, concrete language
Gauss’s paper had remained a secret for so long because it was protected by an old-fashioned cryptographic technique: like most scientific papers of its era, it was written in Latin.
— Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, Vazirani, “Algorithms”
Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating?
—
The Definitive ANTLR Reference — Building Domain-Specific Languages
by Terence Parr
You know you have one when the crash of a computer you’ve never heard of stops you from getting any work done.
— Leslie Lamport
We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!
— Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1972 Turing Award Lecture
The major cause [of the software crisis] is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
