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

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

The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems.

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 there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.