John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.
Edsger DijkstraSimplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
Edsger DijkstraIf you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.
Edsger DijkstraIt is a mistake to think that programmers wares are programs. Programmers have to produce trustworthy solutions and present it in the form of cogent arguments. Programs source code is just the accompanying material to which these arguments are to be applied to.
Edsger DijkstraIn 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".
Edsger Dijkstra