Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in read more

FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I --'the fatal disease'-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain read more

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.

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten read more

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to read more

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea at first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something read more

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one read more

If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows.