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.

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

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

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

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.

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.