 APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. |
| Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! |
| Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change. |
| Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning. |
| Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. |
| About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. |
| The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges. |
| The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague. |
| I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection. |
| The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics. |
| Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. |
| Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. |
| The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. |
| It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. |
| Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon. |
| The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. |
| Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it. |
| Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure. |
| There should be no such thing as boring mathematics. |
| The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings. |
