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

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.

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay.

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

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

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.