Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there’s only one of me.
Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer’s standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products.
Laziness is a programmer’s main virtue.
There’s a saying in the software design industry: “Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.”
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.
Listen to your customers, not your competitors.
Good software, like wine, takes time.
It’s harder to read code than to write it.
Writing code is not production, it’s not always craftsmanship though it can be, it’s design.
Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.
Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they’re succeeding. It’s the software equivalent of playing dead.
Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
This is a software-powered world.
The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.