If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.

The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

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

Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees.

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

Beauty is our business.