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

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.

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

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

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.

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.