Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.
"The ideal engineer is a composite … he is not a scientist, he is not a mathematician, he is not a sociologist, or a writer; but he may use the knowledge and techniques of any or all of these disciplines in solving engineering problems."
"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."
“Design patterns do not lead to good design. Good design leads to design patterns."
"There is nothing permanent except change."
"You cannot write a description of software you want and then have someone develop it on a fixed schedule for a fixed price."
"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 designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation."
"… the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. … If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important."
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
"Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost."
