Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Beauty is our business.
Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
Programming in Basic causes brain damage.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.
The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.
The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.
Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.
Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.
Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!
Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide.
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.
Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.
The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.
Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.
It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.
The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.
Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
Probably I am very naive, but I also think I prefer to remain so, at least for the time being and perhaps for the rest of my life.
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.