“I have always felt sympathy towards the biologists who accept to debate creationists. Now I also understand them better; one can fight opinions, not articles of faith.”

Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.

C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good

Constants are widely known for the detestable practice of changing their values; we should prepare ourselves against the consequences of such fickleness

Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to!

Careful as they may be, developers of Eiffel libraries will always run into cases in which, after releasing a library class, they suddenly experience what in French is called esprit de l’escalier or wit of the staircase: a great thought which unfortunately is an afterthought.

Software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification.

As Mr. Nagle so competently points out, almost no one uses Eiffel; in fact until recently there were only 9 users. But now a 10th person just started, so we are holding a conference, appropriately titled the TENTH Eiffel USER conference, to celebrate.

The role of a trainer or consultant is to empower the customer, not to make himself indispensable

Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.

I think Smalltalk is inappropriate for serious industrial developments. After all, run time is a little late to find out whether you have a landing gear.

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.

Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine…) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

Like a clever reply that would have stunned all the other dinner guests – if only you had thought of it before walking down the stairs after the party is over

I’ve enjoyed doing Wolf Blitzer’s program, and I even enjoyed having a heated debate with Bill O’Reilly. I will do it any time.

Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing…

I suspect the debate over the ethics will be much more heated than the debate over steroids in baseball or any other sport, where the use is limited to a select group of freakish athletes.

I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.

Whenever people are being intellectually dishonest in debate, it is an implicit concession they have lost the fight

Debating against him is no fun, say something insulting and he looks at you like a whipped dog.

Everyone seems to have internalized the fact that you can say anything you want at a televised debate, and only a tiny fraction of the audience will ever see a fact-check. So why not claim the moon is square?

At the debate, Donald Trump backed off of his health care position for 20 years. For 20 years, he has agreed with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on socialized medicine, saying Obamacare doesn’t go far enough. He wants the government to pay for everyone’s health care and to control it.