It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

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

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.

Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.

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

John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."