Into love and out again,
Thus I went and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen:
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
Someone dropped me on my head?
— Dorothy Parker
Cobol has almost no fervent enthusiasts. As a programming tool, it has roughly the sex appeal of a wrench.
— Charles Petzold, “Programming Languages: Survivors and Wannabes,” The New York Times
When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.
— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Look at it this way: MSDOS is an overgrown program loader; the MacOS is an overgrown user interface. Neither is an operating system, but the second is better for running applications.
— Paul Placeway
New UI like having sex with brand-new partner, while blindfolded and wearing mittens and half-drunk so you can’t remember what goes where.
— Zarf (Andy Plotkin) (on OS X)
If C++ has taught me one thing, it’s this:
Just because the system is consistent doesn’t mean it’s not the work of Satan.
— Zarf (Andy Plotkin)
I’ve never understood why it’s impolite to spell a deity’s name correctly. For most people it’s the other way around.
— Zarf (Andy Plotkin)
gdb … . is a god.
— Rob Earhart
If you mean it hurls thunderbolts at you for no reason, and then seduces your wife, then yeah, I guess.
— Zarf (Andy Plotkin)
… All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
— Edgar Allen Poe
That was always the dream, wasn’t it? “I wish I knew then what I know now?” But when you got older, you found out that you now wasn’t you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of those rocky patches was being a twerp.
A much better dream, one that’d ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn’t know then.
— Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
Zephyr is the perfect transport agent for stupid little shit …
— John Prevost