Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees.

If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.

If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.

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.

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 computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.