It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness—not because nature strives for disorder, but because there are so many more ways of being disorderly than of being orderly.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Set the expectation that all systems need to be rewritten eventually. Engineers at the highest level write programs that have to be revised. No one is smart enough to anticipate every new use case or feature, every advancement in hardware, or every adjustment or shift that might require code to be rewritten.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

…an efficient market, from an economist’s perspective, is just one whose average price movement can’t be predicted by you.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria

Any programming language is only a tool. I have been privileged to work with a few world-class programmers. These people will write good code in a programming language that they have never used before.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

Our audience has oddly asymmetric capabilities. By relentlessly pressing for more features sooner, they can spoil software development over the long term. However, they can’t do anything to directly improve software development. They can mess it up, but they can’t fix it.

— mechanical-orchard.com, “Friction” » “Debt”