Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.

Present-day applications are rather different in many respects. Present-day programs are often very large and are being developed by teams that collaborate over periods spanning several years. These teams may be scattered across the globe. The programmers are not the future users of the system they develop and they have no expert knowledge of the application area in question. The problems that are being tackled increasingly concern everyday life: automatic bank tellers, airline reservation, salary administration, electronic commerce, automotive systems, etc. Putting a man on the moon was not conceivable without computers.

We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals.

There is unlimited demand for great programmers. Set of useful, complex programs is nearly infinite. Won't change until General AI arrives.

Programmers were always minor gods, and now they’re becoming greater ones.

making the human race smarter one idiot at a time

Rewarding incompetence and ignorance increases the number of incompetent programmers. Designing programming languages and tools so incompetent programmers can feel better about themselves is not the way to go.

Have we got better at programming things in the last 25 years? I think the answer would be no. They've been small improvements.

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.

A programmer who truly sees his program as an extension of his own ego is not going to be trying to find all the errors in that program. On the contrary, he is going to be trying to prove that the program is correct — even if this means the oversight of errors which are monstrous to another eye. All programmers are familiar with the symptoms of this dissonance resolution — -in others, of course.

People are inventing new programming language all the time but I think that's not the big problem is actually writing programs. I think the big technical problem in building system is what I call "the connecting things together problem". It's a version nightmare problem. It's given things in different languages and actually connecting them together.

Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict.

Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.