Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.

You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.

The job of formal methods is to elucidate the assumptions upon which formal correctness depends.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.

I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it.... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind.