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Mistakes were made.
-- Ronald Reagan

While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern
about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and
painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the
majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but
isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the
software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software
to the end user.
-- [A comment on a blog]

Measure everything you can about the product, and you'll start seeing
patterns.
-- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

All creativity is an extended form of a joke.
-- Alan Kay

We really have to get over the idea that some stuff is just worth
knowing even if you never do anything with it. Human memories happily
erase stuff that has no purpose, so why try to fill up children's heads
with such stuff?
-- Roger Schank, Engines for Education

And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.
Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create
these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that
are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.
-- Joel Spolsky

Only make new mistakes.
-- Phil Dourado

In general, we can think of data as defined by some collection of
selectors and constructors, together with specified conditions that
these procedures must fulfill in order to be a valid representation.
-- SICP, What is meant by data?

We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It's about a process,
a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after
year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for
as long as he or she lives.
-- George Leonard, Mastery.

The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be
simple.
-- Grady Booch

[How friendly will this machine be?] Well, I don’t think it’s a matter
of friendliness, because ultimately if the program is going to
accomplish anything of value, it will probably be relatively complex.
-- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).

The great dividing line between success and failure can be expressed in
five words: "I did not have time."
-- WestHost weekly newsletter 14 Feb 2003

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
-- Pablo Picasso

You have to write for your audience. I would never write (1..5).map
&'*2' in Java when I could write
ListFactoryFactory.getListFactoryFromResource(
new ResourceName('com.javax.magnitudes.integers').
setLowerBound(1).setUpperBound(5).setStep(1).applyFunctor(
new Functor () { public void eval (x) { return x * 2; } }))
I'm simplifying, of course, I've left out the security and logging
wrappers.
-- Reginald Braithwait

We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It's about a process,
a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after
year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for
as long as he or she lives.
-- George Leonard, Mastery.

I would rather be an optimist and be wrong than a pessimist who proves
to be right. The former sometimes wins, but never the latter.
-- "Hoots"

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way
that will allow a solution.
-- Bertrand Russell

Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.
-- Alan Kay

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.
-- Seneca

Side projects are less masturbatory than reading RSS, often more
useful than MobileMe, more educational than the comments on Reddit,
and usually more fun than listening to keynotes.
-- Chris Wanstrath

Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it ain't
fun -- it's entertainment.
-- David Mamet (as relayed by Joss Whedon)

:nunmap can also be used outside of a monastery.
-- Vim user manual

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

Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit
that. But it is nicer to ordinary people.
-- Matz, LL2

Remember: you are alone. Every time you can get help from someone,
it is an opportunity: you should eagerly size it. But then, promptly
return to normal mode: you are alone and you must be prepared to solve
every problem yourself.
-- Eric KEDJI

La tactique, c'est ce que vous faites quand il y a quelque chose à
faire; la stratégie, c'est ce que vous faites quand il n'y a rien à
faire.
-- Xavier Tartacover

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
-- Rush (Freewill)

Let me try to get this straight: Lisp is a language for describing
algorithms. This was JohnMcCarthy's original purpose, anyway: to build
something more convenient than a Turing machine. Lisp is not about file,
socket or GUI programming - Lisp is about expressive power. (For
example, you can design multiple object systems for Lisp, in Lisp. Or
implement the now-fashionable AOP. Or do arbitrary transformations on
parsed source code.) If you don't value expressive power, Lisp ain't for
you. I, personally, would prefer Lisp to not become mainstream: this
would necessarily involve a dumbing down.
-- VladimirSlepnev

No matter how much you plan you’re likely to get half wrong anyway. So
don’t do the ‘paralysis through analysis’ thing. That only slows
progress and saps morale.
-- 37 Signal, Getting real

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