Niklaus Wirth Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Go To statement considered harmful.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

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

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

I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.