quotes from "Dreaming in Code"

"The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs."
--Maurice Wilkes, in 1949, at the dawn of the age of debugging computer programs.

"The hard thing about building software is deciding what to say, not saying it."
--Frederick Brooks

"Is it possible to do great work without great pressure, or is pressure an indispensable part of genius?"
--Michael Toy

"Joy is an asset. It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source’s success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work."
--Eric Raymond

"All programmers are optimists. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists."
--Frederick Brooks

"Front ends are supposed to be elegant, intuitive, versatile; back ends are supposed to be invisible, efficient, rock-solid. The front end talks to people; the back end talks to bits. In Star Wars terms, the front end is the butlerish C3PO; the back end is the unintelligible R2D2."
--Scott Rosenberg

We are still building our software cottage-industry-style today.
--Brad Cox

"There's a difference between transparency aimed at giving visibility and transparency that is aimed at producing collaboration.”
--Ted Leung

"If it takes the typical programmer more than two minutes and twenty-seven seconds to find something, they will conclude it does not exist and therefore will reinvent it."
--Larry Constantine.

My thought on that last one... Yes, but: The price of learning and configuring and tweaking a large system that almost does the required job - and could be similarly battered into shape of handling lots of other tasks- is often larger than the cost of making an original, smaller bit of code that just handles the matter at hand. and, that is also more fun. Or as Rosenberg puts it later in the book: "There is almost always something you can pull off the shelf that will satisfy many of your needs. But usually the parts of what you need done that your off-the-shelf code won’t handle are the very parts that make your new project different, unique, innovative--and they’re why you’re building it in the first place."

Or as he even later refines it:

"Rosenberg’s Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And then, of course, there is a corollary: The only software that’s worth making is software that does something new."
--Scott Rosenberg, "Dreaming in Code"