… what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering”.

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

Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.

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

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.

Beauty is our business.