“As far as I was concerned, the problem was not to get an elegant programming language, but was to get a language that could be translated into efficient code.”— John Backus
“Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”— John Backus
“The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself.”— Howard Aiken
“The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems.”— Norman Ralph Augustine
“It is not the number of hours you put in, but what you put in the hours that counts.”— Thomas Robert Dewar
“The more you can automate, the more you can get to a lights-out environment, the more you can get people out of the process, the more you can get variability and error out of the process.”— Mark V. Hurd
“It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.”— Gottfried Leibniz
“If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.”— Edsger W. Dijkstra
“Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).”— Eric S. Raymond
“Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”— Edward Tufte
“The idea that the harder you work, the better you're going to be is just garbage. The greatest improvement is made by the man or woman who works most intelligently.”— Bill Bowerman