First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words.

— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

Components are how people solve problems above a modest scale; it’s one thing that separates us from chimpanzees. We invented a way of solving problems by simply making it the other guy’s problem. It’s called specialization of labor, and it’s as simple as that. That’s how the humans differ from chimpanzees: they never invented that. They know how to make tools, they have a language, so for most of the obvious things there are no differences between chimps and humans. We discovered how to solve problems by making it the other guy’s problem — through an economic system.

— Federico Biancuzzi, Masterminds of Programming

…the standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Strategy is that which enables alignment between vision and execution.

— Moe Abdula, Ingo Averdunk, Roland Barcia, Kyle Brown, Ndu Emuchay, The Cloud Adoption Playbook

The only way you get good at using a debugger is by spending a lot of time debugging. Spending a lot of time debugging implies that there are always a lot of bugs.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Agile