Intelligent Quotes

“The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.”

“What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? What is the linking thread which gathers these disparate branches into a single discipline? My answer to these questions is simple—it is the art of programming a computer.”

“I was eventually persuaded of the need to design programming notations so as to maximize the number of errors which cannot be made, or if made, can be reliably detected at compile time.”

“In all spheres of human intellectual and practical activity, from carpentry to golf, from sculpture to space travel, the true craftsman is the one who thoroughly understands his tools.”

“Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.”

“Above all, I did not allow anything to be done which I did not myself understand. It worked!”

“In all branches of commerce and industry, history shows dramatic reduction in the error rates when their cost is brought back from the customer to the perpetrator.”

“I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.”

“In the development of our understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction.”

“Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors.”

“The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code, but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code.”

“A crude measure of the simplicity of an engineering tool is the length of the manual required to give a full and complete account of how to use it and avoid misusing it.”

“Computer programming is like doing crossword puzzles, and being paid for it”

“The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user.”

“I realised that both verification and testing were using the same technology—assertions—on a common goal of improving software products in their speed of delivery, their quality, and their reliability.”

“Most problems in real life are poorly understood, in that the real problem is often something different from what it is orginally thought to be.”

“Many computer programs of the present day are of inordinate size—many thousands of pages of closely printed text. Mathematics has no tradition of dealing with expressions on this scale.”

“All advances in engineering are tested first on small-scale models, in wave tanks, or in wind tunnels. Without models, the research would be prohibitively expensive, and progress would be correspondingly slow.”