# [_Diligence, Patience, and Humility_](https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/larry.html), Larry Wall > The yinyang represents a dualistic philosophy, much like The Force in Star Wars. You know, how is The Force like duct tape? Answer: it has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together. I'm not a dualist myself, because I believe the light is stronger than the darkness. Nevertheless, the concept of balanced forces is useful at times, especially to engineers. When an engineer wants to balance forces, and wants them to stay balanced, he reaches for the duct tape. --- > I have upon more than one occasion been requested to eject someone from the Perl community, generally for being offensive in some fashion or other. So far I have consistently refused. I believe this is the right policy. At least, it's worked so far, on a practical level. Either the offensive person has left eventually of their own accord, or they've settled down and learned to deal with others more constructively. It's odd. People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves. --- > But I have to tell you that I don't evaluate the success of Perl in terms of how many people like me. When I integrate these curves, I count the number of people I've helped get their job done. # [The humble programmer](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF), Edsger W. Djikstra > As an aside I would like to insert a warning to those who identify the difficulty of the programming task with the struggle against the inadequacies of our current tools, because they might conclude that, once our tools will be much more adequate, programming will no longer be a problem. Programming will remain very difficult, because once we have freed ourselves from the circumstantial cumbersomeness, we will find ourselves free to tackle the problems that are now well beyond our programming capacity. # [How do we tell truths that might hurt?](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF), Edsger W. Djikstra > The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, our thinking abilities. --- > It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. _Note: [My](https://github.com/hiljusti) first language was BASIC._ # [The end of Computing Science?](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1304.PDF), Edsger W. Djikstra > I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, viz. "How not to make a mess of it", has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive world-wide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed.