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The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn't change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

— Kent Beck Extreme Programming Explained (2000)

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More quotes by Kent Beck

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment.

Extreme Programming Explained (2000)

When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby.

Kent Beck As cited in: Giles Bowkett (2007)

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

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Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident.

Robert F. Kennedy

He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Samuel Johnson The Idler (1758)

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. (Weil die Dinge sind, wie sie sind, werden die Dinge nicht so bleiben wie sie sind.)

Bertolt Brecht Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1976)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Kent Beck (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.