Design free-for-alls produce systems no one can make sense of as a whole, and they are very difficult to maintain. But architectures can straitjacket a project with up-front design assumptions and take too much power away from the developers/designers of particular parts of the application.

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

Maybe the world has gotten so dangerous you can’t have a good, flexible language that one percent or two percent of the programmers will use to make great art because the world is now populated with 75 million run-of-the-mill programmers building these incredibly complicated applications and they need more help than that.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experience of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue. . . . All these have a distinct experienced quality. . . . To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an associated quality of experience.

— David Gelernter, The Tides of Mind

It’s important to realize that being productive requires that you become skilled at managing your emotional state. Emotional stress can kill your ability to code.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary