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.

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

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

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.

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

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.