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 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.

Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

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

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.