"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."

“How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?”

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

“On Our Inability To Do Much.”

“In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy......”

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

“APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.”