It is much more rewarding to do more with less.

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler

Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.

AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder.

In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.