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

~ Dijkstra

A project that does healthy refactoring will be steadily deleting bad code. If nothing's deleted then it's almos certainly a sign that there isn't enough refactoring going on - which will lead to design degradation.

~ Martin Fowler, "Is design dead?"

And what about “nonrational”? That borders on insulting. Many programmers  would rather be accused of murder than be accused of being anything less than completely rational.

~ Andy Hunt

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.

~ Dijkstra

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

~ Dijkstra

By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.

~ Dijkstra

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

~ Dijkstra

Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. 

~ Dijkstra

The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computer systems is a sign of professional immaturity

~ Dijkstra