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

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.

In English every word can be verbed.

Dealing with failure is easy.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

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.

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.