Too Few People Recognize That The High

The Lurking Suspicion That Something Could Be Simplified Is The World's Richest Source Of Rewarding Challenges.

We Shall Do A Much Better Programming Job, Provided That We Approach The Task With A Full Appreciation Of Its Tremendous Difficulty, Provided That We Stick To Modest And Elegant Programming Languages, Provided That We Respect The Intrinsic Limitations Of The Human Mind And Approach The Task As Very Humble Programmers.

Raise Your Quality Standards As High As You Can Live With, Avoid Wasting Your Time On Routine Problems, And Always Try To Work As Closely As Possible At The Boundary Of Your Abilities. Do This, Because It Is The Only Way Of Discovering How That Boundary Should Be Moved Forward.

In This Respect A Program Is Like A Poem: You Cannot Write A Poem Without Writing It. Yet People Talk About Programming As If It Were A Production Process And Measure "programmer Productivity" In Terms Of "number Of Lines Of Code Produced". In So Doing They Book That Number On The Wrong Side Of The Ledger: We Should Always Refer To "the Number Of Lines Of Code Spent".

Thanks To The Greatly Improved Possibility Of Communication, We Overrate Its Importance. Even Stronger, We Underrate The Importance Of Isolation.