“The role of a trainer or consultant is to empower the customer, not to make himself indispensable”

Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.

C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good

Constants are widely known for the detestable practice of changing their values; we should prepare ourselves against the consequences of such fickleness

Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to!

Careful as they may be, developers of Eiffel libraries will always run into cases in which, after releasing a library class, they suddenly experience what in French is called esprit de l’escalier or wit of the staircase: a great thought which unfortunately is an afterthought.

Software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification.

As Mr. Nagle so competently points out, almost no one uses Eiffel; in fact until recently there were only 9 users. But now a 10th person just started, so we are holding a conference, appropriately titled the TENTH Eiffel USER conference, to celebrate.

I have always felt sympathy towards the biologists who accept to debate creationists. Now I also understand them better; one can fight opinions, not articles of faith.

Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.

I think Smalltalk is inappropriate for serious industrial developments. After all, run time is a little late to find out whether you have a landing gear.

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.

Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine…) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

Like a clever reply that would have stunned all the other dinner guests – if only you had thought of it before walking down the stairs after the party is over

My best successes came on the heels of failures.

Writing is an incredibly creatively empowering experience for me. It is the place where nobody tries to control what I’m doing.

Opening your chakras and allowing cosmic energies to flow through your body will ultimately refresh your spirit and empower your life.

And I think that is tremendously empowering and is not diminishing in any way. I fell that any woman who is in control, who is in touch with her femininity and sensuality, is a woman that is empowered.

Conservatism is not about leaving people behind. Conservatism is about empowering people to catch up, to give them the tools at their disposable that make it possible for them to access all the hope, all the promise, all the opportunity that America offers. And our programs to help them should reflect that.

The religions of the world must be assessed, not on the basis of their convoluted theologies, but in terms of the extent to which they serve as forces of liberation and empowerment.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

You’re going through the horror of it, you’re going through the isolation of it but you’re being empowered by reminding yourself that you’re connected to everybody else.