The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
Beware of “the real world”. A speaker’s apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.
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.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.
There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.
The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.
I think of the company advertising “Thought Processors” or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
Thank goodness we don’t have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.
Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.
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.
A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
If there is one ‘scientific’ discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.
In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.
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.
Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.
Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.