Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible… - Edsger W. Dijkstra

The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

We must not forget that it is not our [computing scientists'] business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.

For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages.