An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.

There is no one "root of all evil" in software development. Design is hard in many ways. People tend to underestimate the intellectual and practical difficulties involved in building a significant system involving software. It is not and will not be reduced to a simple mechanical "assembly line" process. Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.

The first law of computer science: Every problem is solved by yet another indirection.

The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.

I assume that a sufficiently skilled will be able to do anything not explicitly forbidden by the hardware.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers.