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

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

Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?

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.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

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.

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