How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

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

Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.

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

It 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.