To be a good programmer is difficult and noble.
-- Robert L. Read in ``How to be a Programmer''


It is a wonderful and surprising fact that programmers are highly
motivated by the desire to create artifacts that are beautiful, useful,
or nifty.
-- Robert L. Read in ``How to be a Programmer''


XML is a standard for defining new standards. It is not a solution to
data interchange problems, [...]
-- Robert L. Read in ``How to be a Programmer''


[About GPLv3]. The Jar-Jar Binks of licenses overshadowed the original,
the same way the second and third Matrix Movies made the first one
less memorable [...]
-- http://www.landley.net/notes.html#13-11-2011


I am very interested in obsoleting GNU bloatware: it's crap. From a
purely technical perspective, the FSF _sucks_at_writing_code_. They're
horrible, and their stuff should die. That's why I got into BusyBox in
the first place: I want GNU-less Linux.
-- http://www.landley.net/notes.html#13-11-2011


Sometimes you have a programming problem and it seems like the best
solution is to use regular expressions; now you have two problems.
-- David Mertz


Unfortunately, C is also a dangerous language that mortal programmers 
cannot reliably wield.
-- Kent Borg


It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops
ideas.
-- Ken Thompson 


I don't think there are many people up in research who have strong
ideas about things that they haven't really had experience with.
-- Ken Thompson 


As some critics would say: There's nothing new in Go! -- They are
missing the point. -- The task of the programming language designer
``is consolidation not innovation'' (Hoare, 1973).
-- Robert Griesemer: The Evolution of Go (GopherCon 2015)


Most C++ style guides define an allowed subset of C++. Russ Cox
imagined a Go style guide where the first sentence is: You can use
the whole language.

	-- Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike: Google I/O 2012 -- Meet the Go Team


Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination.

	-- Rob Pike, utah2000


Patterns are a demonstration of weaknesses in a language.

	-- Peter Norvig


Make interfaces easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly.

	-- Scott Meyers


A programming language that doesn't change the way you think is
not worth learning.

	-- Alan Perlis: Epigrams in Programming


I have to explain that there are two types of knowledge at play:
their coursework and company crap. I tell them that they should
be secure in the quality of their education and never ask their
boss how to copy a string or something like that. But, it's
perfectly OK to ask for help on the internal undocumented crufty
development environment.

	-- Jon Steinhart


#ifdef has more or less always struck me as the solution to the
wrong problem. "We have all this code and we want to shoehorn it
into a new environment," instead of, "we have many environments,
so we carefully structure the code to accommodate the
differences." Of course, the latter is harder than the former,
but it also pays larger dividends over time as compared to the
former.

	-- Dan Cross (on TUHS)


That's the seductive trap of floating-point numbers, isn't it?
They invite us to think about them as if they were the real
numbers, but they are very, very much *not* the real numbers.  And
yet, most of the time, for most applications, if you treat them as
if they were, you get plausible results.

	-- Adam Thornton (on TUHS)


If you have a very small group, it is quite possible to have a
very high level. (Not if it's selected randomly, of course; there
has to be some sorting function.) However, as the group gets much
larger, it is _necessarily_ much more 'average' in the skill/etc
level of its members.

	-- Noel Chiappa (on TUHS)


If you're always the smartest person in the room, you're spending
your time in the wrong rooms.

	-- Tom Teixeira (on TUHS)