Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

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.

A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.