Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.
Edsger DijkstraFORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
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 DijkstraThe purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
Edsger Dijkstra