A developer who can’t discuss modularity and information hiding is like a basketball player who can’t dribble.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

…the views of the socialists. Their views are well known: crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social order—that alone and nothing more, no other causes are admitted—nothing!…

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

…what we think of today as essential programming work will be seen tomorrow as inessential housekeeping.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

A clear argument has to lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what the audience already knows or accepts. If you don’t recurse far enough, you’re just talking to yourself.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality

I like to figure out how things work. And a good test of that is to implement it yourself. To me programming isn’t about typing code into a machine. Programming is about understanding.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work