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.

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

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

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.