I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.

Successful software always gets changed.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices - wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.

Predictability and great design are not friends.