My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing were suddenly restless when response times were more than a second.

The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.

The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties.

My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used.

Design bugs are often subtle and occur by evolution with early assumptions being forgotten as new features or uses are added to systems.