Niklaus Wirth Quotations

Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.

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

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.

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

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.

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.

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.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

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

Go To statement considered harmful.