Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a standstill under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.

The shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn't generally pass through meeting expectations.

Each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected. You can call it beautiful code when the code also makes it look like the language was made for the problem.

When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.

A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know.

I don't claim to be a methodologist, but I act like one only because I do methodology to protect myself from crazy methodologists.

Over and over, people try to design systems that make tomorrow's work easy. But when tomorrow comes it turns out they didn't quite understand tomorrow's work, and they actually made it harder.