Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion.

If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas.

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.

The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.

The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology-the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects.