Social Outcast

"Being a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking." --Eric Raymond

"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration." --Ray Ozzie

"The quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce." --Edsger W. Dijkstra

"A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits." --Edsger Dijkstra

"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."" --Maurice Wilkes

"Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." --Christopher Alexander

Egyptian Pyramid

"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." --Alan Kay

"A test that reveals a bug has succeeded, not failed." --Boris Beizer

"Most software isn't designed. Rather, it emerges from the development team like a zombie emerging from a bubbling vat of Research and Development juice. When a discipline is hugging the ragged edge of technology, this might be expected, but most of today's software is comprised of mostly 'D' and very little 'R'." --Alan Cooper

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." --Bill Gates

"Real Programmers don't know how to cook. Grocery stores aren't open at three in the morning. Real Programmers survive on Twinkies and coffee." --Unknown

"A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." --Doug Linder

On Time Software

"More people have ascended bodily into heaven than have shipped great software on time." --Jim McCarthy

"Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code." --Eric S. Raymond

"A little known fact: the Strategy and State Patterns were twins separated at birth. As you know, the Strategy Pattern went on to create a wildly successful business around interchangeable algorithms. State, however, took the perhaps more noble path of helping objects to control their behavior by changing their internal state. He's often overheard telling his object clients, "Just repeat after me: I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggonit..." --Head First Design Patterns

End of The World

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." --Nathaniel Borenstein