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

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

I was eventually persuaded of the need to design programming notations so as to maximize the number of errors which cannot be made, or if made, can be reliably detected at compile time.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

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.