Simon's collected quotations (random3.txt)
Newer quotes at the top.

In engineering, we always want to make the "right" way the default or easiest
way to do something, and then provide escape hatches where necessary.
-- Adam Wilson
-- 2024-02, on a new standard library edition for the D Programming Language
-- https://forum.dlang.org/post/hqliwbdrimuzzworupdt@forum.dlang.org

Although they were at first puzzled by my view that most software is
problematic, they realized that they experience the same bugs I complain about
all the time. [Those bugs have] become so normal that people hardly notice it,
but that doesn't make it better because bad software wastes human life time
whether they realize it or not.
-- ravenstine
-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38712104

We aim to minimize mistakes, but we don't aim to eliminate all risk. There is
also a risk and opportunity cost to not shipping something we think is ready.
-- Herb Sutter
-- C++ International Standard Schedule

Most people want a smaller language with more features. This is hard. It is
actually possible to get the effect through generalization: So that there is
fewer rules that you have to know because things work more general. But it's
hard.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
-- at CppCon, 2016
-- youtu.be/_wzc7a3McOs at 44:52

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
-- John F. Kennedy

The moderator wins when the players, at the end of a [Zendo] round, say "That
was a good one." The moderator cannot be in competition with the players: He
is setting a puzzle, and the intent of the game is that the puzzle be solved.
A crossword constructor doesn't "win" if you throw away the puzzle unfinished;
in an important sense he has failed.
-- Thomas Brendel
-- https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3092289/way-moderator-win-round

To my mind, one of the measures of a great game
is the ability to construct minimalist problems.
-- Kerry Handscomb
-- https://www.logicmazes.com/games/epam/

Anyone can invent a new chess variant within ten seconds (try it) and,
unfortunately, some people do.
-- David B. Pritchard

These two main mechanisms feel at odds with each other.
There's a reason nobody has mashed up Go + Roulette.
-- taogaming
-- https://taogaming.wordpress.com/2022/03/31/dune-imperium/

In terms of favorite gaming "moments," it's pretty hard to beat solving a
really challenging Zendo rule. It's even more satisfying to see a first-time
player's eyes light up when they solve their first rule.
-- Jamie Rufe
-- https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/285870
    /looking-back-2021-my-top-games-and-new-discoveries?itemid=8298666#8298666

[The object of Zendo] is not to embarrass the players with their inability to
figure out the rule, but to embarrass the players with how long it
took them to figure out such a simple rule.
-- Elliott C. "Eeyore" Evan
-- http://archive.looneylabs.com/mailing-lists/icehouse/msg05016.html

-- Ryan Heckel
-- http://archive.looneylabs.com/mailing-lists/icehouse/msg05016.html

My own personal goal is to write code that is so straightforward that anyone
looking at it would think "Pshaw, anyone could have written that!"
-- Walter Bright
-- https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12828#issuecomment-875999826

Good advice comes with a rationale so you can tell when it becomes bad advice.
-- Raymand Chen
-- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091104-00/?p=16153

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter,
and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.
-- Paul Graham
-- http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html

I really don't like when people say things like "art".
To me that's like "I couldn't think of a logical argument,
so I call it art, and you should like it."
-- aardvarkpepper
-- https://steamcommunity.com/app/898920/discussions/0/2295094230835162306/

The language is incredibly precise, people use it with vagueness and
inaccuracy. People then moan about being picked up on it and start calling
others Grammar Nazis. There are occasions where grammar needs to be sacrificed
for clarity of meaning, but they are rare, to borrow a quote,
'Up with this I shall not put'.
-- Crispin Moakler
-- https://boardgamegeek.com/article/31745911#31745911

Insisting on elegance for its own sake often leads to unexpected improvements
in gameplay that never would have been discovered otherwise.
-- Kory Heath

If X has the social signalling then people will recommend X even without
trying, because it's socially safe. If one doesn't have the signalling, I've
found the hard way even supporters will hesitate a bit before making
recommendations, because of the social standing cost it may have.
-- Guillaume Piolat
-- https://forum.dlang.org/post/oouclwlafdmiezinqbrj@forum.dlang.org

"Or" is the enemy of simplicity (strings can be unquoted or quoted, whitespace
can be spaces or tabs...) because it forces us to make choices which is
counter-productive to achieve the goal of why we are programming.
-- Sylvain Kerkour
-- https://github.com/astrocorp42/san/issues/3#issuecomment-421765849

Mixing tabs and spaces is the beginning of the apocalypse.
-- Sylvain Kerkour
-- https://github.com/astrocorp42/san/issues/3#issuecomment-423241404

Whenever a game designer reaches for randomness in a largely non-random game,
they admit complete failure. They would like to have a feature but are too
lazy to implement it appropriately.
-- Simon
-- IRC, #lix, 2018-04-22, about Commander Keen 1

The reasons people give to not try something new are hardly ever the actual
reasons. People will make up on the spot reasons that they think you want to
hear or that sound good. Their actual reasons they keep to themselves because
they don't sound good. If you talk with someone enough, you'll eventually
figure out their actual reasons.
-- Walter Bright
-- https://forum.dlang.org/post/p5l4sl$28n7$1@digitalmars.com

This is the difficult part to accept. This is the part that will upset you.
You will have many defense mechanisms that will tell you that I am wrong, but
I assure you with certainty that on this point I am delivering divine truth
directly to you.
-- sirlin, Playing to Win (book)

Zig will not bend to accommodate Microsoft's gross incompetence or nefarious
stunts in their inability or unwillingness to provide a decent default text
editor to their paying consumer base. Notepad is the problem here, not Zig.
-- Josh Wolfe
-- https://github.com/zig-lang/zig/issues/544#issuecomment-337466999

Speedrunning is not about what the game looks like initially to a casual
observer. It's about what the game _is_.
-- BenjyMLewis
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/speedrun
    /comments/7mfdes/why_are_exploits_allowed_in_speedruns/drto1zn/

Don't half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.
-- Ron Swanson

I was taught that 0 is even when I was first introduced to the concept in
early elementary school (can't remember which grade after more than 45 years).
It wasn't until I was an adult that I discovered that there were people in the
world who somehow had trouble with this obvious fact.
-- Paul Sinclair
-- https://puzzling.stackexchange.com
    /questions/59368/14-crosses-in-a-6-by-6-grid#comment181877_59372

Haskell is good for writing blog posts, talking about Haskell on threads
un-related to Haskell, and pretending you know category theory.
-- HumanDrivenDev
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7iuakc
    /finding_bugs_in_haskell_code_by_proving_it/

If you can't name a variable, you don't know what you are doing. Very simple.
-- Lerch98
-- https://thedailywtf.com/articles/comments/a-handful-of-beans

When they are watching a magician, people don't want to say, "Well done."
They want to say, "Wow."
-- Toby Litt
-- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/20
    /what-makes-bad-writing-bad-toby-litt

Software sucks because users demand it to.
-- Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft
-- https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401594/why-software-is-so-bad/

With a lot of different salat dressings to choose from, if you buy one and
it's not perfect -- and you know what salat dressing is -- it's easy to
imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been
better. And what happens is: This imagined alternative induces you to
regret the decision you made. And this regret subtracts from the satisfaction
you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision.
The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that
is disappointing about the option that you chose.
-- Barry Schwartz
-- https://youtu.be/VO6XEQIsCoM?t=613

Using vague language is like trying to see those ideas through a dirty lens.
But spending all your time polishing the lens (quibbling over jargon rather
than the underlying concepts) is no good either. You have to actually look
through the lens of language at the ideas underneath.
-- sirlin
-- http://www.sirlin.net/articles
    /writing-well-part-2-clear-thinking-clear-writing

Make your own idioms, if they are superior. Ecosystems worth being in
should have enough users bright enough to appreciate improvements.
-- Anonymous
-- https://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2011/11/09
    /the-last-vestiges-of-hungarian-notation/

Seriously, "why don't you just" almost always means "I haven't understood your
problem but I am going to give you advice anyway".
-- joshu on reddit
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/65qqfr/

In the words of Colin Wright: "You can't make a computer do stuff faster, but
you can make it do less work", and that really is the essence of optimization.
-- Jacques Mattheij
-- http://jacquesmattheij.com/when-haskell-is-not-faster-than-c

Those who can't design are condemned to document.
-- Venkat Subramaniam
-- https://twitter.com/venkat_s/status/648460193064452096

Never conclude that your player will "get used to" doing something in a
non-optimal way. They will only seethe and bad-mouth your lack of design sense.
-- Desi Quintans
-- https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials
    /game-ui-by-example-a-crash-course-in-the-good-and-the-bad--gamedev-3943

Whenever I read that arbitrary users are expected to have good judgement,
I hear alarm bells shrilling from all sides.
-- Nepster
-- http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2711.msg58194#msg58194

Well, of course, what do programmers do?
When you say "you cannot call it", they want to call it.
-- Venkat Subramaniam

There are always two reasons to do something: a good one and the right one.
We make a decision ("build our own bug tracker"), then justify it ("we need
full control"). Most people aren't even aware of their true motivation. To
change their minds, you have to attack the real reason, not the justification.
-- MattW
-- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/62153
    /reasons-not-to-build-your-own-bug-tracking-system

Botting is usually a symptom of a far more essential problem of your game:
When players feel the need to automatize some aspect of the game, that means
it is so boring that they don't feel it's worth their time.
-- Philipp
-- http://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4449
    /how-can-cheating-be-prevented-in-a-floss-multiplayer-game

Apple is the devil. Google is just some evil guy. Microsoft is the wannabe
villain but can't compete against them at all. Even Facebook and Amazon are
better at being evil these days.
-- elias
-- freenode.org #allegro, December 2016

Every design or implementation choice, in any programming language, carries a
trade-off and numerous costs. There is seldom a right answer.
-- Rust Code of Conduct
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/rust
    /comments/2rvrzx/our_code_of_conduct_please_read/

The actual simplicity of software is not proportional to the lines of code, or
the number of actions or command line arguments or anything like that. It's
proprtional to the number of questions about that software on stack exchange,
or the number of pages in the book about how to administer it.
-- cbloom

Every once in a while, even a total idiot or a complete moron can come up
with a good idea. Once this happens, the rest of us idiots and morons
conspires to fuck it up as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Fortunately,
good ideas can often fend for themselves, survive the assault of stupidity,
and persevere.
-- Luke Maciak
-- http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2008/10/16/wysiwyg-is-a-lie/

If you're ugly, broke, and can write quicksort in at least two languages,
you can get laid all the time.
-- raymorris on slashdot
-- https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9663063&cid=52900737

I have no idea what the thought process [to find simplicity] is in any
repeatable manner. If anything, it's simply a dogged sense that there's got
to be a better way. It took me years to suddenly realize that a template
function is nothing more than a function with two sets of parameters --
compile-time and run-time -- and then everything just fell into place.
-- Walter Bright
-- https://dlang.org/blog/2016/08/30
    /ruminations-on-d-an-interview-with-walter-bright/

The greatest masters know when to not execute their power. The best state
leader is who could, but never needs to, punish citizens. Likewise, the best
object-oriented designers know when object-oriententation is inappropriate.
-- ADmiral
-- During voicechat

Anyone who sees the world in terms of clean logic has to be mystified and
bewildered by many of the rules in popular board games. Especially ancient
board games, like Go, that have suffered thousands of years of pollution
from meddling humans.
-- Darse Billings
-- https://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/forum/topic2.jsp?forum=10&topic=194

Why does an e-book reader need a page-turn effect? Like having a fake
needle on a CD player. Or horse-shit coming from the back of a car.
-- blprnt
-- https://twitter.com/blprnt/status/11450794157

This [lever design] is all so the [aircraft's] pilot knows what control his
hands are on without looking at it. But as a cockpit designer told me once,
everything that seems intuitively obvious in cockpit design was paid for
with blood.
-- Walter Bright
-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12271357

Repetition in process calls for automation.
Repetition in logic calls for abstraction.
-- Steve Smith
-- http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com
    /wiki/index.php/Don%27t_Repeat_Yourself

reCAPTCHA is one of the most elegant solutions I've ever seen to a problem.
It's not even killing two birds with one stone, it's killing two birds
with one of the birds.
-- Thaelon on slashdot
-- http://xrl.us/bfmg6t

Napster and ICQ were absolute trainwrecks in terms of user interface. But
it simply didn't matter. What they delivered was so compelling, and the
competition was (at the time) so inffective, that these developers could
get away with terrible UIs.
-- Jeff Atwood
-- https://blog.codinghorror.com/youll-never-have-enough-cheese/

I have often felt that programming is an art form, whose real value can
only be appreciated by another versed in the same arcane art; there are
lovely gems and brilliant coups hidden from human view and admiration,
sometimes forever, by the very nature of the process.
-- http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html

If you are designing a truly new langauge, you implement it, then you trash
it, and redesign it and write a new spec. The alternative, to just iterate,
is what gives you languages like Perl and PHP.
-- Ola Fosheim Grøstad
-- http://forum.dlang.org/thread/vlosobeqnvfrfuriedpv@forum.dlang.org?page=16

It's easy to turn a fun, sandboxy pastime into a game by adding a
time-pressure to it, but that's almost always the least interesting way
to do it, and it usually has negative side-effects.
-- Kory Heath
-- http://www.koryheath.com/katamari-vs-peggle/

The reason you are displaying information in a chart or graph is that
you want to make it easier to interpret and compare information.
Pie charts do quite the reverse.
-- Steve Fenton
-- https://www.stevefenton.co.uk/2009/04/pie-charts-are-bad/

With age come all of these barnacles that hang off the ship.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBbv1ej0fFo&t=1464

Good design is consequent to the very last detail.
Nothing may be left to arbitrary decisions or chance.
Thoroughness and precision express respect for the user.
-- Dieter Rams
-- http://www.designwissen.net/seiten
    /10-thesen-von-dieter-rams-ueber-gutes-produktdesign

A good programmer will make a hard task look easy;
a bad programmer will make an easy task look hard.
-- David Thomson
-- http://wiki3.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/index.php/Keep_it_simple

For some odd reason, having an opinion and sticking to it
is considered a value, and changing one's point of view
in consideration of evidence a weakness.
-- geoo
-- https://www.nordicbots.com/?id=73&net=quakenet
    &cid=81576&year=2016&month=5&day=29

Where There Is Controversy, There Must Be Data.
-- Katie Sherwin
-- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/breaking-web-conventions/

Much of the relative simplicity of Java is - like for most new languages -
partly an illusion and partly a function of its incompleteness.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
-- http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#Java

If it is unpleasant to explain something, it is probably unpleasant to use it.
-- Scott Meyers
-- https://youtu.be/5tg1ONG18H8?t=2783

I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector.
You could prove things to people and they would have to believe you
whether they liked you or not.
-- John Allen Paulos
-- Innumeracy
-- https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/era.html

When you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it
is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life
reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills
of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and
productively in a state of confusion.
-- Anonymous
-- https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-understand-advanced-mathematics

No loops. Loops in your program are bugs.
-- Walter Bright
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh8WETRT7q4&t=991

Game design is pretty much one giant incestuous ball of borrowing, and,
honestly, is better for it.
-- ZorbaTHut
-- http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1653
    /how-closely-can-a-game-legally-resemble-another

There's really no such thing as wasting time, as long as you're learning.
-- Adam D. Ruppe
-- https://youtu.be/xc4Ux3qxPuM?t=388

Javascript is not shit because of its bad performance. Javascript is shit
because it is inconsistent, chaotic and unreasonable. Programming works
like this:
1. Make it correct.
2. Make it readable.
3. Make it fast.
Javascript skipped all three. C++ skipped only 2.
-- ASK_ME_ABOUT_BONDAGE
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments
    /2kxi89/jonathan_blow_a_programming_language_for_games/

Somewhere along the line someone thought it was a great idea to
talk about how to write code rather than actually write code.
This book is Design Patterns. I don't recommend it.
-- Jonathan Gardner
-- http://tech.jonathangardner.net/wiki/Singleton_design_pattern

Don't trade a debugged design for undebugged theoretical soundness.
-- Simon
-- http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2424.msg55600#msg55600

Weak/Dynamic: Garbage in, Garbage out.
Static: Garbage in, Meaningful diagnostic message out.
-- Abscissa
-- https://semitwist.com/articles/article
--          /view/why-i-hate-python-or-any-dynamic-language-really

This is my #1 rule to determine if it's a good game or not: The bigger,
brighter and bolder the word FUN [is printed on the box], the worse it is.
-- Brian Jurney
-- http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/170175/

I have never met anyone who can do Scheme, Haskell, and C pointers who
can't pick up Java in two days, and create better Java code than people
with five years of experience in Java. But try explaining that to the
average HR drone.
-- Joel Spolsky
-- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

Everybody and their cat understands string concatenation.
-- Andrei Alexandrescu

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-- Max Planck

People in business only have one person to blame if their busniess fails,
and that's themselves, not the people who choose not to support them.
-- amhopeless
-- about writing anti-AdBlock software
-- https://blog.pagefair.com/2013/stop-adblock-increase-ad-revenue/

Most of the time, I'm actually very happy.
It's just that when I'm happy, I'm quiet.
-- Linus Torvalds
-- https://youtu.be/5PmHRSeA2c8?t=3770

Overall my understanding of your message is "My system would be better not
for a fundamental technical reason, but because I am willing to pour in it
time and talent." This is the kind of argument I have a lot of respect for.
-- Andrei Alexandrescu

Tabs [when used to indent code, instead of spaces] are a symptom of never
having worked in a team environment.
-- 2a0c40 (Reddit user)
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/programmerchat/comments/377j2f/tabs_or_spaces/

Ten years ago, each bookstore has at least one shelf full of Java books.
Not anymore. Java has become a new Cobol -- a boring business language
that universities use to torture students.
-- http://www.softpanorama.org/Bookshelf/Computers/java.shtml

The idea is not so much to find solutions to problems,
it's to design the problem out of existence.
-- Walter Bright

Things that do less actually do more.
This editor has no clue what I'm doing.
So I can do anything I want with it.
-- Venkat Subramaniam (hilarious Indian Scala guy)
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IigBP0FCM3Y

If people can't understand your vocabulary, they must assume that you are
very intelligent and that your algorithms are very deep.
-- Roedy Green
-- How to write unmaintainable code
-- http://www.mindprod.com/jgloss/unmainotherpeople.html

I would prefer a "do what you're fucking told, you're the computer and I'm
the human" option, but software in general is sorely lacking in such an
option.
-- ChoHag on freenode #git

When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than
ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create.
-- waffle_ss
-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4176075

Perl is "some assembly required". Python is "batteries included".
PHP is "kitchen sink, but it's from Canada and both faucets are labeled C".
-- http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I've written a lot of parsers for various niche file formats. I have come
to realize that this is an utter waste of time, when there's an
off-the-shelf format that can be pressed into service.
-- Walter Bright
-- http://forum.dlang.org/post/n350jq$7ai$1@digitalmars.com

Never underestimate the resourcefulness of a bad programmer!
-- bitwise
-- http://forum.dlang.org/thread/risabcjwblptdjcbwfho@forum.dlang.org
-- #post-bgwscinciloqacbjpewl:40forum.dlang.org

Attitude is no substitute for competence.
-- Eric S. Raymond
-- Appendix to Cathedral and the Bazaar

Designing rigid, closed software that won't talk to the rest of the world
is an unhealthy form of arrogance.
-- Eric S. Raymond
-- The Art of Unix Programming
-- http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
-- Ken Thompson

Simon: I want Arch! Or Gentoo. But Gentoo users are considered stupid,
    so it's gonna be Arch.
ADmiral: Arch is already a mainstream distribution nowadays.
Simon: Fuck!

Usability [in my company] -- that's printing to the screen as often as
possible what people could do, or what they have to do. Like "Please click
this button at least once a day, but not while the import is running or if
the data is garbage!!"
-- ADmiral
-- describing bad software development practices at his old job

The more different ways you manage to describe the same thing, the higher
the chance that it will click for the user [who is asking for help]. I like
people leaving feeling smarter than they did before... both for humanistic
reasons and to feed my massive ego.
-- from the #git channel FAQ
-- http://jk.gs/git/helping.html

Write every commit message like the next person who reads it were an
axe-wielding maniac who knows where you live.
-- unknown, play on the same saying about commenting code

The persistent vision that software development can be simplified by
removing programming is, to the programmer who understands what is
involved, obviously naïve. But the mental process that leads to this
mistake is part of human nature and programmers are just as prone
to making it as everyone else.
-- AlanGriffiths
-- http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php
    /Don%27t_Rely_on_%22Magic_Happens_Here%22

If patients would actually listen to their alternative medicine doc who
told them that they need to get more exercise, eat better, de-stress, sleep
better, etc. then they would probably be healthier. But of course that's
not what people want, people want magic pills that don't require them to do
any work.
-- cbloom rant

It's pretty much been established over the entire course of human history
that, no matter how many times people *claim* to want to hear the truth,
they never really do. If you want to get girls to like you, lie your ass
off. And buy a Porsche.
-- ParanoidObsessive

I will assert that intelligent women are rare. I'll further assert that
intelligent men are rare. Look around you, 1 out of every 1.00015 people
you meet are as dumb as a box of hammers.
-- discussion on boardgamegeek.com

People are not always what they seem, but rarely they are anything better.
-- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
-- Nathan der Weise, 1779

There is only one problem with common sense; it's not very common.
-- Milt Bryce

Building muscle is putting a little engine inside your body that constantly
burns calories day after day. All you RTS players should know the first
thing you should do is build lots of harvesters that will just keep working
for you even when you're idle.
-- cbloom
-- http://www.cbloom.com/fitness.html

Perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when
there is nothing more to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
-- author of The Little Prince

Zendo can be played (often is, especially in the early stages)
trial-and-error style, but with a sufficiently difficult rule there will be
always some glorious moment (the reason I play the game) where players must
apply evidence-driven, theory-driven, interpretation-driven thinking to
arrive at understanding.
-- NateStraight
-- https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1395934/play-zendo-new-york-times

An actual well-written article is almost random-access. You can skim
through it looking for the good parts. Really hard to do with videos.
And [in articles,] you have to say every single word to really make
your argument. You don't leave these giant gaps between thoughts like
you do with slides.
-- Scott Meyers
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smqT9Io_bKo

A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and
survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it's in your
lab where you're endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature.
A really important feature. Your product must have it.
-- Joel Spolsky
-- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html

One of the things I personally consider most important when it comes to
technical people is this notion of taste. And the reason I gave git off to
Junio is, it took me... not even months, it took me, like, weeks, to
realize: Okay, this guy has taste. And he's shown it ever since.
-- Linus Torvalds
-- in 2014, about giving maintainership of git to Junio Hamano in 2005
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8

The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep
trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.
-- Markus Persson
-- author of Minecraft, who sold it for 2.5 billion USD

DustMite does not try to be smart or clever. It tries to be thorough.
This has several advantages. I could use a D lexer to parse the D code,
but the bigger this lexer is, the more likely it is to have a bug.
You really don't want your debugging tools crashing on you.
So that's why the DustMite parser is intentionally simple.
-- Vladimir Panteleev
-- on a code-reducing debugging tool for D programs at D conference 2014
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iXRFlKvEY0

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy
because they know what it's like to feel absolutely worthless and they
don't want anyone else to feel like that.
-- Robin Williams

In corporate religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not
because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility
that he is right.
-- Antony Jay

Any time there's an opportunity to remove thinking [= the need to think],
it's a good thing to do. Then we can focus on other things.
-- Hilarious Indian Scala Guy
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH75sJAR0hc#t=2345

If you go to a conference for a programming language that is different from
C++, and you say uncomplimentary things about C++, you're a big hit.
-- Scott Meyers

I know, that's a really stupid idea. Well, in fact, that's not a stupid idea.
When you don't know what you should do, you try something, anything. And
usually, amazing things will happen.
-- ruzoh
-- (author of a youtube Transarctica let's-play)

In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble.
-- Alan Perlis

It is a fascinating fact of human psychology that people are much more likely
to solve a problem if they know that someone else has already solved it.
-- Kory Heath
-- http://www.koryheath.com/zendo/tips-for-the-student/

One of my mortal enemies are the "don't worry about it, it'll be fine"
people. No, it will fucking not be fine. You know what will happen? It'll be
a nasty god damn race bug, which I will wind up fixing while the "don't
worry about it, it'll be fine" guy is watching lolcatz or browsing facebook.
-- cbloom
-- http://cbloomrants.blogspot.de/2013/02/02-18-13-don-write-spaghetti.html

Shotgun formatting? Where you shove all your letters into a shotgun, point
it at the screen, and BLAM! You've Got Code?
-- Steve Yegge
-- http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de
   /2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html

If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and
should fix your program.
-- Linus Torvalds
-- https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle