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.

I can't be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It's at that level.

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.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

It was _such_ a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad …

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement