An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.
The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay.
If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles – but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature that.
Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity.
If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.
Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.
The cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.
Know what you're talking about.
Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
When we use a language, we should commit ourselves to knowing it, being able to read it, and writing it idiomatically.
One of the great skills in using any language is knowing what not to use, what not to say. There's that simplicity thing again.
Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
Inspiration comes from the act of writing.
To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that.
Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about the go to statement. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!
The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
We don't think of ourselves as being perfectionists, really. To us it's more about desperately trying to have it sound more or less OK.
The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.
Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical.
... as a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than to try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.
I think psychoanalyze-pinhead is the important lesson of GNU Emacs.
It's hard to read through a book on the principles of magic without glancing at the cover periodically to make sure it isn't a book on software design.
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