A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.

I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.