“I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.”

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?

I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?

A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.

It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.

Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.

But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.

And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.