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

The iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible. And the implications of that are huge... The iPhone is in deep trouble.

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

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

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.

You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.