When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.

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.

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

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

A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.

A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.