Some problems are better evaded than solved..

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its rela….

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….

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 ….

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming..

In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction ari….

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

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..

Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out..

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

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 b….

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can….

What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? Wha….

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..

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity..

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 ….

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

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, vulnerab….