Niklaus Wirth Quotes

But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensable luxury, but a simple necessity.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence.

A good designer must rely on experience, on precise, logic thinking; and on pedantic exactness. No magic will do.

In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.

A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want.

C++ is an insult to the human brain

Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer's standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. (Or, sometimes known by] Grove [the head of Intel] giveth and Gates [the head of Microsoft] taketh away.)

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Programming is usually taught by examples.

Our ultimate goal is extensible programming. By this, we mean the construction of hierarchies of modules, each module adding new functionality to the system.

Usually its users discover sooner or later that their program does not deliver all the desired results, or worse, that the results requested were not the ones really needed.

But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs.

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

My duty as a teacher is to train, educate future programmers.

Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming.

I have never designed a language for its own sake.

Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples.

Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality.

The idea that one might derive satisfaction from his or her successful work, because that work is ingenious, beautiful, or just pleasing, has become ridiculed.

Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated.

The possible solutions to a given problem emerge as the leaves of a tree, each node representing a point of deliberation and decision.

Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.

It is evidently necessary to generate and test candidates for solutions in some systematic manner.

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

Reliable and transparent programs are usually not in the interest of the designer.

During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible.

Go To statement considered harmful.