We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger - especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.

Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.

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

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

Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.

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

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.