"Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now.""

"Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them."

"Smart, and Gets Things Done"

"If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work."

"Full service brokers, in this day and age of low cost mutual funds and discount brokers, are really nothing more than machines for ripping off retail investors."

"Self hosting email is like pounding needles into your eyes. You should never do that. Pay someone else to pound those needles so you can just lie back and enjoy it."

"One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub."

"But instead I'm stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds."

"If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy."

"Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use."

"There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course."

"These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are … something else entirely."

"Nothing comes for free."

"Your needs are big because the Internet is big."

"[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript."

"Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer."

"Browser compatibility problems are nature's way of saying "stop trying to be so fuckin' clever"."

"I've noticed that when I get quoted in .sig files, it's never any of the actual clever things I say all the time. Usually it's something dumb."

"C (it's not just a language, it's a grade)"

"Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school."

"If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself."

"I dug in a bit but then the smell of gasoline and burning flesh drove me away."

"My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others."

"Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"

"Today, I use Linux as my primary OS (on an x86 PC, and on a Thinkpad), and I also use Irix (on an SGI O2). Linux has improved a great deal since I wrote this, specifically with respect to its ease of installation."

"Linux is only free if your time has no value."

"I'd just like to take this moment to point out that C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string."

"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes."

"You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out."

"The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe."

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

"I personally object to episodic games where you play one screen of Space Invaders and one screen of Breakout and one screen of Galaxians and one screen of this and one of that. To me, that's not a game. It's just taking five bad games, putting them together, and calling them one good game. I'm philosophically against that."

"That game, just the brutal simplicity. It’s amazing as a game designer you want to have the latest graphics, and you want the Chicago Symphony playing your background music, and you want Harrison Ford and Matt Damon as your starring characters. But if you have an incredibly addictive game, you don’t need any of that crap. You just need blocks."

"As you get all this money out there, there’s a tendency for more conservatism and sequelization. So we’re doing ‘Madden 38,’ but now the shoelaces have shadows! And when you step on the turf, the grass is just pressed a little bit, and springs back in just a couple of seconds. Unfortunately, it’s kind of the death of creativity when you make a big deal about really trivial features."

"I think managers have realized that most software people are slightly brain damaged, that they're off on their own planets."

"It has to be well timed. It needs to have the right components that maybe contain emerging technologies or something like, say, when Doom came out -- the Network play -- there weren't many games like that. There was a really great 3D world that a lot of people hadn't seen. It was light-years ahead of Wolfenstein. It was shareware, so it had Internet distribution. We used the Internet to get it all over the place. So it used a lot of stuff that was just becoming popular at that time. id just capitalized on it."

"Doom 2 is just such a bigger, badder, better version of Doom"

"Suck it Down."

"John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch."

"Design is Law"

"A few months ago I was visiting my mother, and she said that as a child I had always wanted to learn everything, and that it took me a long time to realize that you couldn't learn everything. I got really angry, and I shouted "I'm not done yet!""

"Some questions are logically nonsensical because the querent thinks they know more than they do. A lot of these have the form ‘How do I use X to accomplish Y?’ There's nothing wrong with this, except that sometimes X is a chocolate-covered banana and Y is the integration of European currency systems."

"In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they'll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion."

"You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

"Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work."

"The whole youth-idolatry oh-god-not-another-birthday thing has to be the most sure-fire way to be unhappy about the way things are progressing in your life."

"If ordinary people can really figure out how to set the alarm at a hotel, then we are going to make OpenOffice default to vi keybindings in the next Novell Linux Desktop."

"People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment...But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like "the radiolucent lungs" and "ligamentous laxity.""

"How many of you have broken no laws this month?"