Quotes from Niklaus Wirth

Our ultimate goal is extensible programming. By this, we mean the construction of hierarchies of modules, each module adding new functionality to the system.

In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.

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

A good designer must rely on experience, on precise, logic thinking and on pedantic exactness. No magic will do.

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

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.

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.

Increasingly, people seem to interpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling – the incomprehensible should cause suspicion, not admiration. Possibly this results from the mistaken belief that using a mysterious device confers [extra] power on the user.

The power of recursion evidently lies in the possibility of defining an infinite set of objects by a finite statement. In the same manner, an infinite number of computations can be described by a finite recursive program, even if this program contains no explicit repetitions.