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

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

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

FORTRAN, 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.

John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."

I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this," well, that would be enough immortality for me.