"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

"For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesity; as a…"

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth gen…"

"Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: If a group of N persons implements a [COBOL] compiler, there will be N-1 passes…"

"When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, …"

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."

"Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distrib…"

"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 …"

"To the designer of programming languages, I say: unless you can support the paradigms I use when I program, or at lea…"

"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typ…"