FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

It is a mistake to think that programmers wares are programs. Programmers have to produce trustworthy solutions and present it in the form of cogent arguments. Programs source code is just the accompanying material to which these arguments are to be applied to.

Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

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

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