“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.”

There is no such thing as a free variable.

Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Every reader should ask himself periodically.

One can only display complex information in the mind.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.

Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.

I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house.