“No man ever wet clay and left it rest, expecting it to become bricks by chance and fortune.”
#Plutarch

“Every sizable program ever written has achieved robustness through testing and is inadequately understood even by its designers.”
#JohnRegehr

“The bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was #Lisp itself. These were Maxwell's Equations of Software!”
#AlanKay
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

“Several sciences are often necessary to form the groundwork of a single art.”
#JohnStuartMill, 1848

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
#Dijkstra

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”
#LeslieLamport

“Simplicity is not an end in art, but we usually arrive at simplicity as we approach the true sense of things.”
#ConstantinBrancusi

“We build our computer [systems] the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”
#EllenUllman

“Software's like Egyptian pyramids: millions of bricks, no structural integrity, done by brute force and 1000s of slaves.”
#AlanKay
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

“An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.”
John Tukey

“[O]ne can build objects & their behavior from little more than assignable value cells & good old lambda expressions.”
#RichardGabriel
https://dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveNotFailedNarr.html

“There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.”
#DonaldKnuth on software patents

“One can make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies or make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
#TonyHoare

“Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.”
#MarkRippetoe

#Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

“Human history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.”
#EOWilson

“At Atari we hired based on hobbies and not grades in school. We ended up with he best engineering group in the world.”
#NolanBushnell

“Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
#JeanGiraudoux

“#Emacs become part of me.”
#YukihiroMatsumoto
www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-...

“Scientific American should have a poetry column.”
#ClaudeShannon

“Innovators in both [art and science] are basically dreamers and storytellers.”
#EOWilson

“I can live with doubt [...] it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
#Feynman

“Certum quod factum”
“(One is certain only of what one builds)”
#GiambattistaVico, presumably regarding library dependencies

“It is downright sinful to teach the abstract before the concrete.”
#ZAMelzak

“I wrote my first 'cool' programs in Fortran IV, my first 'aha' programs in Algol, and my first 'wow' programs in LISP.”
#RobPike

“I designed my own bitmap font for use with #Emacs.”
#DonaldKnuth

“Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.”
#UmbertoEco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“If you don't overcome your tendency to give up easily, your life will amount to nothing.”
#MasutatsuOyama

“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it.”
#Feynman

“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
#GeorgeBernardShaw