I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this," well, that would be enough immortality for me.

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.

Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.

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 you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.