The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine.

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry