Teaching Cobol Ought To Be Regarded As

A Most Important, But Also Most Elusive, Aspect Of Any Tool Is Its Influence On The Habits Of Those Who Train Themselves In Its Use. If The Tool Is A Programming Language This Influence Is, Whether We Like It Or Not, An Influence On Our Thinking Habits.... A Programming Language Is A Tool That Has Profound Influence On Our Thinking Habits.

Simplicity Is A Great Virtue But It Requires Hard Work To Achieve It And Education To Appreciate It. And To Make Matters Worse: Complexity Sells Better.

In This Respect A Program Is Like A Poem: You Cannot Write A Poem Without Writing It. Yet People Talk About Programming As If It Were A Production Process And Measure "programmer Productivity" In Terms Of "number Of Lines Of Code Produced". In So Doing They Book That Number On The Wrong Side Of The Ledger: We Should Always Refer To "the Number Of Lines Of Code Spent".

Apl Is A Mistake, Carried Through To Perfection.

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.