What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying . . . and talking films had already appeared—not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

modern software is inherently complex, and no matter how hard you try, you’ll eventually bump into some level of complexity that’s inherent in the real-world problem itself. This suggests a two-prong approach to managing complexity: Minimize the amount of essential complexity that anyone’s brain has to deal with at any one time. Keep accidental complexity from needlessly proliferating. Once you understand that all other technical goals in software are secondary to managing complexity, many design considerations become straightforward.

— Steve McConnell, Code Complete

Knowing the syntax of a language is not enough to be a “programmer,” let alone to be a good programmer. Being “idiomatic in language X” is less valuable and less important than high—quality in design. Knowing the abstruse details of “API Y” does not make you a better software developer; you can always look up the answer to that kind of question! The real skills—the things that really differentiate great programmers from poor programmers—are not language-specific or framework-specific. They lie elsewhere.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

Adopting new practices doesn’t necessarily make technology better, but doing so almost always makes technology more complicated, and more complicated technology is hard to maintain and ultimately more prone to failure.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

It is your own responsibility to stop yourself from thinking cultishly, no matter which group you currently happen to be operating in.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind (Rationality