Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

— David Gelernter

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

— anonymous

Data is more tractable than program logic. It follows that where you see a choice between complexity in data structures and complexity in code, choose the former. More: in evolving a design, you should actively seek ways to shift complexity from code to data.

— Linus Torvalds

The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

— E. W. Dijkstra

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

— C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

— anonymous

The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code.

— Paul Graham