I was looking in my old Bell Labs notebooks and found this (handwritten) passage from 1997. It has some arguable points, and I'd probably say much of it differently today (with fewer male pronouns at least), but I found it worth rereading. I was thinking about the book that would eventually become The Practice Of Programming with BWK.
Note that there are whole sentences in this short passage that can't fit in a toot, but the alt text appears unbounded, so grab it there if you care.
Also, life is short, so if you want to engage in debate about how I thought about software 27 years ago by arguing the fine points in this excerpt from a private notebook, I might act unkindly and block you.
@robpike "Don't write code; build software." I'm pretty proud of this concise little mantra I came up with years ago that seems to align with your musings. :)