“Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.”

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.

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

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.

You think you KNOW when you learn.

I once fell through a hole in the stage.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a a hundred times, I’m forty-four years old.

Youth comes but once in a lifetime.

No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.

Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest.

There are some who would like to see the oil rigs removed right down to the ground once their job is done, and there are others, and I count myself among them, who think that once they are in place they begin to be adopted by life in the ocean as a habitat.