Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists.

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build the most important function that software builders do for their clients is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements. For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want. They usually do not know what questions must be answered, and they have almost never thought of the problem in the detail that must be specified.

A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.

But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.

Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.