The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.

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.

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.

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

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

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.