Barbara Liskov

"When faced with complexity, the instinct should always be to simplify, not to accommodate."

"Testing is not about proving you are right; it is about discovering what you got wrong."

"The most important part of any system is the part that other people have to understand."

"Design is a conversation between what is possible and what is necessary."

"A good specification is worth a thousand lines of defensive code."

"The power of abstraction lies in knowing what to forget."

"Every programming language embodies design choices that reflect our understanding of how to think about problems."

"Correctness without usability is a hollow victory."

"In team work, the quality of communication determines the quality of the code."

"Design patterns are not rules to follow blindly; they are wisdom earned through repeated mistakes."

"The interface between modules is where bugs hide; design it with care."

"A system that is hard to understand is a system that will be hard to maintain, and hard to maintain means expensive."

"Type systems are not about being pedantic; they are about expressing intent and preventing a category of mistakes."

"Good design should make the correct solution obvious and the incorrect solution impossible."

"Change is inevitable; design for it from the start."

"The best documentation is code that is so clear it documents itself."

"Every time you make something private, you are making a commitment to future maintainers."

"Software is not about the code; it is about the people who write it and the people who use it."

"Elegance in design comes from understanding the problem deeply enough to know what matters."

"A good error message is a moment of grace in an otherwise frustrating experience."

"Concurrency is not an advanced feature; it is a fundamental aspect of how the world works."

"The coupling between modules should be as minimal and as explicit as possible."

"Reuse is important, but correctness is sacred."

"When you find yourself writing the same pattern three times, that is the universe telling you something."

"A program that is correct but inefficient is better than a program that is fast but wrong."

"The best code reviews are conversations, not interrogations."

"Education in computer science should teach thinking, not just syntax."

"Debugging is about understanding, not just fixing."

"The architecture of a system reveals the architecture of the organization that built it."

"Simplicity on the outside, sophistication on the inside—that is good design."