Professors typically spend their time in meetings about planning, policy, proposals, fund-raising, consulting, interviewing, traveling, and so forth, but spend relatively little time at their drawing boards. As a result, they lose touch with the substance of their rapidly developing subject. They lose the ability to design; they lose sight of what is essential; and they resign themselves to teach academically challenging puzzles.

Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence.

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

A good designer must rely on experience, on precise, logic thinking; and on pedantic exactness. No magic will do.

Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality.

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want.