Some problems are better evaded than solved.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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