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.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

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.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)

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

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.