Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

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.

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

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature