A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/apr-09/pursuing-simplicity John Gall A life lived in fear is a life half lived. A poem is never finished, only abandoned. http://www.dreamsongs.com/ArtOfLisp.html Paul Valery A ship in the harbour is safe...but that is not what ships are built for. Any comparison of hot JVM languages is likely to note that "Clojure is not object-oriented." This is true, but it may lead you to the wrong conclusions. It’s a little like saying that a rifle is not arrow-oriented. http://blog.thinkrelevance.com/2009/8/12/rifle-oriented-programming-with-clojure-2 Stuart Halloway Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently large C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally- specified, bug-ridden, slow implimentation of half of Common Lisp. Philip Greenspun Brevity is the soul of wit. http://www.two-sdg.demon.co.uk/curbralan/papers/BrevityIsTheSoulOfWit.html Kevlin Henney C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4112#comment-62529 Scott McKay consensus always breeds mediocrity Das allerletzte, was ich jemals wollte, war, am Leben zu sein, wenn die drei mächtigsten Menschen auf dem Planeten Bush, Dick und Colin heißen. Kurt Vonnegut Der Pass ist wichtiger als das Tor. Eric Cantona Die Tatsache, daß eine Meinung weithin geteilt wird, ist noch lange kein Beweis dafür, daß sie nicht absolut absurd ist. Bertrand Russell Die Wahrheit ist nicht demokratisch. Steffen Glückselig Do one thing every day that scares you. http://www.gungfu.de/steffen/everybody.html Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work. Gallagher Don’t blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for ‘the average programmer’, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421715/quotes?qt0504699 Benjamin Button Functional programming is like describing your problem to a mathematician. Imperative programming is like giving instructions to an idiot. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/071226.html Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. Mark Twain I love the smell of geek rage in the morning. http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=61651 I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/071226.html Douglas Adams I think programmers have become inured to incidental complexity, in particular by confusing familiar or concise with simple. And when they encounter complexity, they consider it a challenge to overcome, rather than an obstacle to remove. Overcoming complexity isn't work, it's waste. http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/rich-hickey-geek-of-the-week/ Rich Hickey I'd rather lose at rugby than win at softball. Ich möchte Frieden auf Erden und eine gute Gesinnung für jedermann.Wir gehören zur Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten vonAmerika. Wir machen sowas nicht. Aus Sneakers, glaube ich. If someone set off a bomb in this room, it would wipe out half of the worldwide Lisp community. That might not be a bad thing for Lisp, because it would have to be reinvented. John McCarthy If someone was to drop a bomb on this building, it would wipe out 50 percent of the Lisp community. That would probably be a good thing. It would allow Lisp to start over. http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2005/06/ilc-2005-wednesday-report-late.html John McCarthy If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran. If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/071226.html Guy Steele In einer Zeit des Universalbetruges ist die Wahrheit zu sagen eine revolutionäre Tat. http://de.altermedia.info/general/michael-winkler-die-diktatur-der-mitte-300108_12831.html George Orwell Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees. Hence industry rejects any methodological proposal that can be viewed as making intellectual demands on its work force. http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/banuj/i_must_confess_that_i_was_very_slow_in/ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change. Charles Darwin Jesus saves, Buddha does incremental backups. http://byzero.de/zitate/ Knowledge is a full circle. Lisp - the notion of writing your code directly in tree form - is an idea that’s discovered time and again. People have tried all sorts of crazy alternatives, writing code in XML or in opaque binary formats or using cumbersome code generators. But their artificial Byzantine empires always fall into disrepair or crush themselves into collapse while Lisp, the road that wanders through time, remains simple, elegant, and pure. http://corfield.org/blog/post.cfm/the-joy-of-clojure Steve Yegge Loese das Problem und nicht die Schuldfrage. Make it work. Make it right. Make it beautiful. Make it fast. http://www.gungfu.de/facts/wiki/Main/PrematureOptimization Military justice is to justice what military music is to music. Groucho Marx Nothing becomes true because tenthousand people believe it, nor false because tenthousand people refuse to do so. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD447.html Our ability to imagine complex applications will always exceed our ability to develop them. Grady Booch Sie wollen ein geistiges Duell? Ich duelliere mich nicht mit Unbewaffneten! von Guttenberg am Nockherberg 2011 Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html Paul Graham Style distinguishes excellence from accomplishment. http://www.catonmat.net/blog/musical-geek-friday-god-wrote-in-lisp-eternal-flame/ James Coplien The average function does to numbers what Gaussian blur does to pictures. Avoid it if you want to see the edges. http://isaacdevelopers.blogspot.com/2009/05/graphical-comparison-of-programming.html The Dilbert Principle observes that in the modern economy, the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work. http://byzero.de/the-dilbert-principle-0 The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/32858.html Bertrand Russell The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell There are two ways to try to make a software system reliable: make it so simple that it obviously has no bugs, or make it so complicated that it has no obvious bugs. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-October/345521.html Alex Martelli These languages will never be mainstream, because the mainstream would never see the benefits they provide. The mainstream would kill themselves with such power. There's a reason the mainstream likes manifest typing, procedural programming, and cut and paste methodologies, quite simply, it's all they can handle. http://onsmalltalk.com/languages-of-the-gods This is not a trivial exercise. And yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot if you aren't careful. But in the end, there's two kinds of programmers in the world: those with dangerous techniques and those who dig. Reg Braithwaite Reg Braithwaite Turns out the border between genius and insanity is a pretty cheery place. http://landoflisp.com/ Paul Graham Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code. Eric S. Raymond Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58640/great-programming-quotes/58806#58806 Edward V Berard Without a remembrance of things past, without a trained eyed, we miss the beauty and elegance that's present in the mundane. IEEE 3/4 09, p. 13 Grady Booch Work to become, not to acquire.