Our technological civilization depends on software

--- Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, interview with, “The Problem with Programming," MIT Technology Review November 28, 2006

More:

"Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it: a system just "sort of evolved" into something minimally acceptable. Personally, I prefer to know when a system will work, and why it will."

"There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses. "