“I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.”

One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Optimization hinders evolution.

If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.

I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.

That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Any noun can be verbed.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn’t.

We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.

In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.

When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously.

Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.

Change is inevitable. Change is constant.

In a progressive country change is constant; change is inevitable.

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.