Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

Production speed is severely slowed down if one works with half-time people who have other obligations as well. This is at least a factor of four; probably it is worse.

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

LISP has jokingly been described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer." I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.