Donald Knuth
Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, is a renowned computer scientist and winner of the 1974 Turing Award.
Knuth refers to this as "Hoare's Dictum" 15 years later in "The Errors of Tex", Software—Practice & Experience 19:7 (July 1989), pp. 607–685. However, the attribution to C. A. R. Hoare is doubtful.
The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.
The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.
Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.
The reason is not to glorify "bit chasing"; a more fundamental issue is at stake here: Numerical subroutines should deliver results that satisfy simple, useful mathematical laws whenever possible. [...] Without any underlying symmetry properties, the job of proving interesting results becomes extremely unpleasant. The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.
We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.