“Fiddling with a program until it appears to work is a reliable way of obtaining a program that almost works”

“Kyra is working on a new program and I’m going to test it. (Chris)That’s one way of putting it. (Urian)”

“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.”

“Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”

“Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get from many other things.”

“The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.”