There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.

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.

In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

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