"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add,but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"One person's syntax is another person's semantics." -- Joseph Goguen
"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
"It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures." - Alan J. Perlis
"Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
"Smart data structures and dumb code works alot better than the other way around." - Eric S. Raymond
"Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity." - David Gelernter
"The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. The terrible temptation to tweak should be resisted unless the payoff is really noticeable." - Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy
"Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better." - Steve McConnell