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

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

In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore, for the time being, their differences.

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

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

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.