The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

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

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.

I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine.

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

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