9 quotes
We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!
The Humble Programmer (1972)
The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
We must not forget that it is not our [computing scientists'] business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.
The Humble Programmer (1972)