Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.

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 purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.