Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure. - Edsger W. Dijkstra

"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me."

When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.