The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise..

The prisoner falls in love with his chains..

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility,….

If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't….

Programming in Basic causes brain damage..

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians..

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes..

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentall….

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test t….

The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better..

Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology..

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells bett….

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim..

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning..

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity..

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing..

Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act..

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California..

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated..

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to star….