L. Peter Deutsch

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.

When I was at what I would consider the peak of my abilities, I had extremely trustworthy intuition. I would do things and they would just turn out right.

Every now and then I feel a temptation to design a programming language but then I just lie down until it goes away.

Language systems stand on a tripod. There’s the language, there’s the libraries, and there are the tools. And how successful a language is depends on a complex interaction between those three things.

I would make a strong case that programming languages have not improved qualitatively in the last 40 years. There is no programming language in use today that is qualitatively better than Simula-67.

I never in my wildest dreams would have predicted the evolution of the Internet. And I never would’ve predicted the degree to which corporate influence over the Internet has changed its character over time.

Software is a discipline of detail, and that is a deep, horrendous fundamental problem with software.