"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."

"Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning."

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."

"What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself."

"Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program. "

"Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline."

"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."

"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."

"If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. That was a surprise to me - that people were prepared to painstakingly write HTML."

"What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself."

"I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."

"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim."

"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence."

"The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple."