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

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

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about the go to statement. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!

… what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering”.

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.