"As soon as we started programming, we found out to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." (Maurice Wilkes, 1949)
"A source of strength in the early days was that groups in various parts of the world were prepared to construct experimental computers without necessarily intending them to be the prototype for serial production. As a result, there became available a body of knowledge about what would work and what would not work." (Maurice V Wilkes, "Computers Then and Now", 1968)
"Acceptance of the idea that a processor does one thing at a time - at any rate as the programmer sees it - made programming conceptually very simple, and paved the way for the layer upon layer of sophistication that we have seen develop. [...] Revolutionary advances, if they come, must come by the exploitation of the high degree of parallelism that the use of integrated circuits will make possible. The problem is to secure a satisfactorily high factor of hardware utilization, since, without this, parallelism will not give us greater power." (Maurice V Wilkes, "Computers Then and Now", 1968)
"At the present time, choosing a programming language is equivalent to choosing a data structure, and if that data structure does not fit the data you want to manipulate then it is too bad. It would, in a sense, be more logical first to choose a data structure appropriate to the problem and then look around for, or construct with a kit of tools provided, a language suitable for manipulating that data structure." (Maurice V Wilkes, "Computers Then and Now", 1968)
"In the judgment of design engineers, the ordinary means of communicating with a computer are entirely inadequate. […] Graphical communication in some form or other is of vital importance in engineering as that subject is now conducted; we must either provide the capability in our computer systems, or take on the impossible task of training up a future race of engineers conditioned to think in a different way." (Maurice V Wilkes, "Computers Then and Now", 1968)
"Surveying the shifts of interest among computer scientists and the ever-expanding family of those who depend on computers for their work, one cannot help being struck by the power of the computer to bind together, in a genuine community of interest, people whose motivations differ widely." (Maurice V Wilkes, "Computers Then and Now", 1968)
"The artificial intelligence approach may not be altogether the right one to make to the problem of designing automatic assembly devices. Animals and machines are constructed from entirely different materials and on quite different principles. When engineers have tried to draw inspiration from a study of the way animals work they have usually been misled; the history of early attempts to construct flying machines with flapping wings illustrates this very clearly." (Maurice V Wilkes, "Computers Then and Now", 1968)
"The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs." (Maurice Wilkes, "Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer", 1985)
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