Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

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

I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.

The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code.

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.