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

The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

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

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time