Some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra, On the foolishness of "natural language programming" (1976)

Source: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html

EWD 667, written 1976-79 according to the citation.

Topics: programming