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

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.

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

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

I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

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.

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