Sound methodology can empower and liberate the creative mind; it cannot inflame or inspire the drudge. -- Frederick P. Brooks, No Sliver Bullet.

C’s great for what it’s great for. -- Ben Hoyts (micropledge)

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. -- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

A hacker on a roll may be able to produce–in a period of a few months–something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more. -- Peter Seebach

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter. -- Eric Raymond

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. -- Hans Hofmann

Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value. ~Albert Einstein

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It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. ~Herman Melville

You may only succeed if you desire succeeding; you may only fail if you do not mind failing. ~Philippos