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Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under
robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated;
but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for
they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C.S. Lewis

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing
them.
-- Aristotle.

Since programmers create programs out of nothing, imagination is our
only limitation. Thus, in the world of programming, the hero is the one
who has great vision. Paul Graham is one of our contemporary heroes. He
has the ability to embrace the vision, and to express it plainly. His
works are my favorites, especially the ones describing language design.
He explains secrets of programming, languages, and human nature that can
only be learned from the hacker experience. This book shows you his
great vision, and tells you the truth about the nature of hacking.
-- Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator of Ruby

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying
that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
-- Alanna

Ce n'est que par les relations qu'on entretient entre nos différentes
connaissances qu'elles nous restent accessibles.
-- Shnuup, sur l'hypertexte (SELFHTML -> Introduction -> Definitions sur l'hypertexte)

La haine est une liqueur précieuse, un poison plus cher que celui des
Borgia, - car il est fait avec notre sang, notre santé, notre sommeil,
et les deux tiers de notre amour! Il faut en être avare!
-- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.

It is better to be quiet and thought a fool than to open your mouth and
remove all doubt.
-- WikiHow

Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a
computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it
transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our
most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
-- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal (attributed)

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
first method is far more difficult.
-- C. A. R. Hoare

The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The
courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change
course when they find better evidence.
The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated;
being a master of the obvious is underrated.
Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity
-- Bob Sutton

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of
indirection.
-- Butler Lampson

New eyes have X-ray vision. [someone that hasn't written it is more
likely to spot the bug. "someone" can be you after a break]
-- William S. Annis

Heureux l'étudiant qui comme la Rivière peut suivre son cours sans
quitter son lit...
-- Sebastien, sur commentcamarche.net

And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.
Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create
these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that
are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.
-- Joel Spolsky

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking
zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.
-- Robert Firth

Mastering isn’t a survival instinct; it’s an urge to excel. Mastering is
one of the experiences that delineates us from animals. It is striving
to be more tomorrow than we are today; to perfectly pitch the ball over
home plate; to craft the perfect sentence in an article; to open the
oven and feel the warm, richly-scented cloud telling you dinner is going
to be absolutely extraordinary. We humans crave perfection, to be
masters of our domain, to distinguish ourselves by sheer skill and
prowess.
-- Joesgoals.com

Well then. How could you possibly live without automated refactoring
tools? How else could you coordinate the caterpillar-like motions of all
Java’s identical tiny legs, its thousands of similar parts?
I’ll tell you how:
Ruby is a butterfly.
-- Stevey, Refactoring Trilogy, Part 1.

Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.
-- Alan Kay

Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute.
-- Alan J. Perlis

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under
robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated;
but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for
they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C.S. Lewis

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
-- Cicero

The lesson of the story might appear to be that self-interested and
ambitious people in power are often the cause of wastefulness in
developing countries. But self-interested and ambitious people are in
positions of power, great and small, all over the world. In many places,
they are restrained by the law, the press, and democratic opposition.
Cameroon's tragedy is that there is nothing to hold self-interest in
check.
-- Tim Harford

Students should be evaluated on how well they can achieve the goals they
strived to achieve within a realistic context. Students need to learn to
do things, not know things.
-- Roger Schank, Engines for Education

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are always cocksure and
the intelligent are always filled with doubt.
-- Bertrand Russell

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

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which
matter least.
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
-- Joel Spolsky (The Law of Leaky Abstractions)

To do something well you have to love it. So to the extent you can
preserve hacking as something you love, you're likely to do it well. Try
to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. If
you're worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably
is.
-- Paul Graham.

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you get a round one.
-- Douglas Crockford (Author of JSON and JsLint)

Remember: you are alone. Every time you can get help from someone,
it is an opportunity: you should eagerly size it. But then, promptly
return to normal mode: you are alone and you must be prepared to solve
every problem yourself.
-- Eric KEDJI

An expert is, according to my working definition "someone who doesn't
need to look up answers to easy questions".
-- Eric Lippert.

Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
-- Randy Pausch

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of
indirection.
-- Butler Lampson

It(mastering)’s knowing what you are doing.
-- Joesgoals.com

But what is it good for?
-- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM,
commenting on the microchip, 1968

A little learning is a dangerous thing.
-- Alexander Pope

There really is no learning without doing.
-- Roger Schank, Engines for Education

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines
produced but as lines spent.
-- Edsger Dijkstra

Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better
idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and
better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.
-- Rich Cook

What Paul does, and does very well, is to take ideas and concepts that
are beautiful in the abstract, and brings them down to a real world
level. That's a rare talent to find in writing these days.
-- Jeff "hemos" Bates, Director, OSDN; Co-evolver, Slashdot

Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
-- Alan Perlis

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average
lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000
times the price of an average software writer.
-- Bill Gates

We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It's about a process,
a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after
year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for
as long as he or she lives.
-- George Leonard, Mastery.

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]

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines
produced but as lines spent.
-- Edsger Dijkstra

Linux is only free if your time has no value.
-- Jamie Zawinski

Resume writing is just like dating, or applying for a bank loan, in that
nobody wants you if you're desperate.
-- Steve Yegge.

In God I trust; I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me?
-- David (Psalm 56:4)

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Hence my urgent advice to all of you to reject the morals of the
bestseller society and to find, to start with, your reward in your own
fun. This is quite feasible, for the challenge of simplification is so
fascinating that, if we do our job properly, we shall have the greatest
fun in the world.
-- E. W. Dijkstra, On the nature of computing science.

The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.
-- Elie Wiesel

Photography is painting with light.
-- Eric Hamilton

Hire people smarter than you. Work with people smarter than you.
Listen to them. Let them lead you. Take the blame for all failures,
give away the credit for all successes.
-- How to fail: 25 secrets learned through failure

An expert is, according to my working definition "someone who doesn't
need to look up answers to easy questions".
-- Eric Lippert.

Humans aren't rational -- they rationalize. And I don't just mean "some
of them" or "other people". I'm talking about everyone. We have a "logic
engine" in our brains, but for the most part, it's not the one in the
driver's seat -- instead it operates after the fact, generating
rationalizations and excuses for our behavior.
-- Paul Buchheit

Ne te mets pas de limite, la vie se chargera de la mettre a ta place.
-- Darryl AMEDON

Are you willing to wear your white belt?
-- George Leonard, Mastery.

When you’ve got the code all ripped apart, it’s like a car that’s all
disassembled. You’ve got all the parts tying all over your garage and
you have to replace the broken part or the car will never run. It’s not
fun until the code gets back to the baseline again.
-- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any
more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert
painter.
-- Eric Raymond

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