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.

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.

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

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid not in Dutch alone - its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.