Given all the hundreds of books we’ve seen on how to get started on test-driven development, I wish there’d be just one or two that’d focus on how to tame the beast.

~ DHH

Don't give in to the false authority of a method. People may walk into meetings with an acre of class diagrams and 150 use cases, but all that paper is still just their fallible interpretation of requirements and design.

~ Dave Thomas & Andrew Hunt

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

~ SICP

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

~ PHP: a fractal of bad design

Languages need hype to survive; I just wish people didn't have to be blinded by it.

~ Steve Yegge

Never become a slave to a methodology: circles and arrows make poor masters.

~ Andrew Hunt & Dave Thomas