It was estimated in 1993 that there had been over 1000 high-level languages invented and implemented since the beginning of the 1950s.

— Charles Petzold, Code

“Without commerce, advanced social orders can’t evolve, so we’re stuck in the primitive state where every nerd fabricates everything from first principles.”

— Federico Biancuzzi, <Masterminds of Programming

There are two ways to get a rigid design: Make too many assumptions about the future. Write code without enough design.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity

What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.

— Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave

Yet physicists have discovered that systems whose component parts have a capacity to act collectively often show recurrent features even though they might seem to have nothing at all in common with one another.

— Philip Ball, Critical Mass