• The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

    Edsger Dijkstra: The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
    "The Humble Programmer". Edsger Dijkstra's ACM Turing Award lecture, "Communications of the ACM", Volume 15, No. 10, www.cs.utexas.edu. October 1972.