The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

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.

Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

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.