«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.»

«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.»

«If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas.»

«Computers can now keep a man's every transgression recorded in a permanent memory bank, duplicating with complex programming and intricate wiring a feat his wife handles quite well without fuss or fanfare»

«Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.»

«The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it's a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.»

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

«So the vision of Microsoft is pretty simple. It changed a couple years ago. For the first 25 years of the company, it was a personal computer on every desk and in every home. And it was a very good vision; very rare for a company to be able to stick with something like that for 25 years. The reason we changed it was simply that it became acceptable. . . . And so as we stepped back and looked at what we were trying to do with the programming model, turning the Internet into the fabric for distributed computing, getting your information to replicate in a very invisible way so that it was available to you everywhere, thinking of this programming model spanning all the different devices, we changed to the mission statement we have now, which is empowering people through great software anytime, any place and on any device.»