My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

The possible solutions to a given problem emerge as the leaves of a tree, each node representing a point of deliberation and decision.

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

The idea that one might derive satisfaction from his or her successful work, because that work is ingenious, beautiful, or just pleasing, has become ridiculed.