Too many managers and executives try to reduce programming to a low-level assembly-line activity. That's inefficient, wasteful, costly in the long run, and inhumane to programmers.

Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won't get much smarter.

Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naive or a salesman.

My impression was and is that many programming languages and tools represent solutions looking for problems, and I was determined that my work should not fall into that category. Thus, I follow the literature on programming languages and the debates about programming languages primarily looking for ideas for solutions to problems my colleagues and I have encountered in real applications. Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies.

When done well, software is invisible.

Certainly not every good program is object-oriented, and not every object-oriented program is good.

It's easy to win forgiveness for being wrong; being right is what gets you into real trouble.