What Do Older Programmers Know That Younger Ones Don't?

Everything in software development has already been invented. People just keep rediscovering it and pretending they invented it. Whatever you think is so cool and new, was copied from Smalltalk, or HAKMEM, or Ivan Sutherland, or Douglas Engelbart, or early IBM, or maybe Bell Labs.

Maintaining code is harder than writing it. Writing lots and lots of new code can be a mark of laziness.

You’re going to forget what your code does in a few months. Make it ridiculously easy to read.

Good programmers write good code. Great programmers write no code. Zen programmers delete code.