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.

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.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

I now have had my foggy crystal ball for quite a long time. Its predictions are invariably gloomy and usually correct, but I am quite used to that and they won't keep me from giving you a few suggestions, even if it is merely an exercise in futility whose only effect is to make you feel guilty.

In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid not in Dutch alone - its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism.

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.

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