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.

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

LISP has jokingly been described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer." I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.

We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.