A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance.
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.
A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.
If you cannot grok the overall structure of a program while taking a shower, you are not ready to code it.
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.
If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.
The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
The only way for errors to occur in a program is by being put there by the author. No other mechanisms are known. Programs can't acquire bugs by sitting around with other buggy programs.
If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. 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. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
Programming is similar to a game of golf. The point is not getting the ball in the hole but how many strokes it takes.
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.
A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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