Edsger W. Dijkstra
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague" (from 1972 Turing Award Lecture)
"Program testing can best show the presence of errors but never their absence"
"If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not start writing it."
"The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
Go To Statement
Considered Harmful
Donald E. Knuth
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, but not tried it."
Niklaus Wirth.
"We just have to admit that programming computers is difficult"
Alan Turing - the definitive site with articles
"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity . . . . The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgments which are not the result of conscious trains of reasonings."