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

— Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer (1972)

Source: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html

From Dijkstra's 1972 Turing Award lecture, The Humble Programmer.

Topics: software design