“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.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.