A treasure trove of quotes in a single blog post. A few choice lines:

1. People in the industry are very excited about various ideas that nominally help you deal with large code bases, such as IDEs that can manipulate code as "algebraic structures", and search indexes, and so on. These people tend to view code bases much the way construction workers view dirt: they want great big machines that can move the dirt this way and that.
2. Design Patterns was a mid-1990s book that provided twenty-three fancy new boxes for organizing your closet, plus an extensibility mechanism for defining new types of boxes.
3. If you have a million lines of code, at 50 lines per "page", that's 20,000 pages of code. How long would it take you to read a 20,000-page instruction manual?
4. ...you should take anything a "Java programmer" tells you with a hefty grain of salt, because an "X programmer", for any value of X, is a weak player. You have to cross-train to be a decent athlete these days. Programmers need to be fluent in multiple languages with fundamentally different "character" before they can make truly informed design decisions.
5. I personally tried Groovy and found it to be an ugly language with a couple of decent ideas. It wants to be Ruby but lacks Ruby's elegance (or Python's for that matter). It's been around a long time and does not seem to be gaining any momentum, so I've ruled it out for my own work. (And I mean permanently – I will not look at it again. Groovy's implementation bugs have really burned me.)