Donald Knuth

"I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof."

"The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random."

"A good technical writer, trying not to be obvious about it, but says everything twice: formally and informally. Or maybe three times."

"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming."

"In a way, you'd say my life is a convex combination of English and mathematics. ... And not only that, I want my kids to be that way: use left brain, right brain at the same time – you got a lot more …"

"To summarize: We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objec…"

"In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art."

"By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality."