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

Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.

We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.

The use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible to argue about programs independently of their being executed.

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.

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?

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.