“If you ask beginning programmers to write a calendar control, they often think to themselves, "Oh, I'm going to write the world's best calendar control! It's going to be polymorphic with respect to the kind of calendar. It will have displayers, and mungers, and this, that, and the other." They need to ship a calendar application in two months. They put all this infrastructure into place in the control, and then spend two days writing a crappy calendar application on top of it. They'll think, "In the next version of the application, I'm going to do so much more."

Once they start thinking about how they're actually going to implement all of these other concretizations of their abstract design, however, it turns out that their design is completely wrong. And now they've painted themself into a corner, and they have to throw the whole thing out. I have seen that over and over. I'm a strong believer in being minimalistic. Unless you actually are going to solve the general problem, don't try and put in place a framework for solving a specific one, because you don't know what that framework should look like.”
— Anders Hejlsberg, The Trouble with Checked Exceptions

"It is what" illicits intensions.

“Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve.”
— Stephen Jay Gould

“Life is a distributed object system.”
— Roy T. Fielding, 1998

“Bad concurrency models make programming artificially difficult.”
— Joe Armstrong, 2014

“The reasonable thing just doesn’t work.”
— John Stewart Bell

“It becomes very tempting to ask whether, in principle, it's possible to create a universe in the laboratory—or a universe in your backyard—by man-made processes.”
— Alan Guth

“I am rooting for the machines! I have always been on the machines' side.”
— Claude Shannon, 1987

“Space tells matter how to move;
Matter tells space how to curve.”
— John Archibald Wheeler

“There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.”
— Phil Karlton

“Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.”
— Fred Brooks

Frameworks increase productivity but decrease freedom.

“...we are not exactly computers.”
— Roger Penrose

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer

“When it is useful to them, men can believe a theory of which they know nothing more than its name.”
— Vilfredo Pareto

“Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion? No, not if I am satisfied with the result.”
— Oliver Heaviside

“There's more than one way to do it.”
— #Perl motto

“There should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it.”
— Zen of #Python no. 13

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
— G. K. Chesterton

“Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.”
— Theodor Adorno

“I find that the whiter my hair becomes the more ready people are to believe what I say.”
— Bertrand Russell

“We are not won by arguments that we can analyse, but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.”
— Samuel Butler