Top 30 Niklaus Wirth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer’s standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products.”

— Niklaus Wirth

Featured in: Programming Quotes

2. “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.”

— Niklaus Wirth

3. “Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling – the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.”

— Niklaus Wirth

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

— Niklaus Wirth

5. “A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want.”

— Niklaus Wirth

6. “But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensible luxury, but a simple necessity.”

— Niklaus Wirth

7. “The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.”

— Niklaus Wirth

8. “Programming is usually taught by examples.”

— Niklaus Wirth

9. “Go To statement considered harmful.”

— Niklaus Wirth

10. “Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.”

— Niklaus Wirth

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

— Niklaus Wirth

12. “Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.”

— Niklaus Wirth

13. “Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.”

— Niklaus Wirth

14. “The possible solutions to a given problem emerge as the leaves of a tree, each node representing a point of deliberation and decision.”

— Niklaus Wirth

15. “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.”

— Niklaus Wirth

16. “Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.”

— Niklaus Wirth

17. “Reliable and transparent programs are usually not in the interest of the designer.”

— Niklaus Wirth

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

— Niklaus Wirth

19. “Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.”

— Niklaus Wirth

20. “Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence.”

— Niklaus Wirth

21. “Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality.”

— Niklaus Wirth

22. “Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples.”

— Niklaus Wirth

23. “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.”

— Niklaus Wirth

24. “It is evidently necessary to generate and test candidates for solutions in some systematic manner.”

— Niklaus Wirth

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

— Niklaus Wirth

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

— Niklaus Wirth

27. “The idea that one might derive satisfaction from his or her successful work, because that work is ingenious, beautiful, or just pleasing, has become ridiculed.”

— Niklaus Wirth

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

— Niklaus Wirth

29. “Usually its users discover sooner or later that their program does not deliver all the desired results, or worse, that the results requested were not the ones really needed.”

— Niklaus Wirth

30. “I have never designed a language for its own sake.”

— Niklaus Wirth

31. “I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.”

— Niklaus Wirth

32. “Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated.”

— Niklaus Wirth