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Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
-- John Lennon

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
-- John Lennon

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

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]

Within a computer natural language is unnatural.
-- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring
aircraft building progress by weight.
-- Bill Gates

C and Lisp stand at opposite ends of the spectrum; they're each great at
what the other one sucks at.
-- Steve Yegge, Tour de Babel.

When your enemy is making a very serious mistake, don't be impolite and
disturb him.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte (allegedly)

I'm always happy to trade performance for readability as long as the
former isn't already scarce.
-- Crayz (Commentor on blog.raganwald.com)

Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to
think out every case.
-- Francis Glassborow

L’art qui satisfait le besoin le plus impérieux sera toujours le plus
honoré.
-- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.

Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
-- Ralph Johnson

State is the root of all evil. In particular functions with side effects
should be avoided.
-- OO Sucks (bluetail.com)

Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months
might as well have been written by someone else.
-- Eagleson’s Law

It's like a condom; I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and
not have it.
-- some chick in Alien vs. Predator, when asked why she
always carries a gun

In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume
that it is true and try to find out what it could be true of.
-- George Miller

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary
words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a
drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary
parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or
avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word
tell.
-- William Strunk, Jr. (The Elements of Style)

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to
smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
-- Mary Ellen Kelly

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are
chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound
one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two
ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one
another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into
one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is
separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real
existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas
are made.
-- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last
recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control
outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will
always have the last word.
-- Nassim Taleb

Always dive down into a problem and get your hands on the deepest issue
behind the problem. All other considerations are to dismissed as
"engineering details"; they can be sorted out after the basic problem
has been solved.
-- Chris Crawford

Within a computer natural language is unnatural.
-- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create
more leaders.
-- Ralph Nader

My dream is that people adopt it on its own merits. We're not trying to
bend Ruby on Rails to fit the enterprise, we're encouraging enterprises
to bend to Ruby on Rails. Come if you like it, stay away if you don't.
We're not going head over heels to accommodate the enterprise or to lure
them away from Java. That's how you end up with Java, if you start
bending to special interest groups.
-- David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby On Rails' creator)

Training research shows that if you get speed now you can get quality
later. But if you don't get speed you will never get quality in the long
run.
-- Philip Greenspun

It is said that the real winner is the one who lives in today but able
to see tomorrow.
-- Juan Meng, Reviewing "The future of ideas" by Lawrence Lessig

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can
handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then
handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more
ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.
-- Pablo Picasso

Just like carpentry, measure twice cut once.
-- Super-sizing YouTube with Python (Mike Solomon, [email protected])

To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is
half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to
be.
-- author unknown (quoted in `Robust Systems', Gerald Jay Suseman)

Workers of the world, the chains that bind you are not held in place by
a ruling class, a "superior" race, by society, the state, or a leader.
They are held in place by none other than yourself. Those who seek to
exploit are not themselves free, for they place no value in freedom. Who
is it that really employs you and commands you to pick up your daily
load? And who is it that you allow to pass judgment on the adequacy of
your toil? Who have you empowered to dangle the carrot before you and
threaten with disapproval? Who, when you wake each morning, sends you
off to what you call your work?
Is there an "I want to" behind all your "I have to," or have you been so
long forgotten to yourself that "I want" exists only as an idea in your
head? If you have disconnected from your soul's desire and are drowning
in an ocean of "have to," then rise up and overthrow your master. Begin
the journey toward emancipation. Work only in such a way that you are
truly self-employed.
-- Tim Gallwey, The inner game of work

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

Do you want to sell sugared water all your life or do you want to change
the world?
-- Steve Jobs, to John Sculley (former Pepsi executive)

Code is poetry.
-- wordpress.org

I'm always happy to trade performance for readability as long as the
former isn't already scarce.
-- Crayz (Commentor on blog.raganwald.com)

Revolutions come from standing on the shoulders of giants and facing in
a better direction.
-- Alan Kay

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