The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

Beauty is our business.

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

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.

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.

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

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.