As an industry, we have undervalued the importance of software design. We obsess over languages and frameworks. We have arguments over IDEs versus text editors or object-oriented programming versus functional programming. Yet none of these things comes close to being as important, as foundational, as ideas like modularity or separation of concerns to the quality of our output.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

I’ve never liked the term “computer science.” The main reason I don’t like it is that there’s no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history…

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Marx is the prophet, Marcuse is his interpreter, and Mao is the sword.

— Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

…the qualities that make somebody a well-functioning human being and the qualities that make somebody a really good programmer—they overlap but they don’t overlap a whole heck of a lot.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

W. Edwards Deming once observed, ‘a bad system will beat a good person every time.’

— Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project