Niklaus Wirth Quotes

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

You have to develop your whole game to completion.

It's something special being able to build a program up.

Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.

Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge. That's fine.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

If you know how to make software, then you can create big things.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

I'm a great coder. But I am not pushing that so much anymore because there are thousands of great coders.

I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.

You can’t really understand the challenges involved with any major tech project until you start trying to build it.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.

Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him.

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

I don't like programming. It's tedious.