Heh, one of my lecturers was ranting about the millions wasted on research grants for testing methodologies when it's proven that they can't formally confirm program correctness. Old Edsger had a lot of foresight in that respect. Still, he's gloriously ambiguous about what he considers a 'modest and elegant programming language'.
It was the Turing Award Lecture in 1972. Printed in "Classics in Software Engineering" by Yourdon Press, 1979, ISBN 0917072146
Here are some of the previous submissions here on HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=86288
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109724
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126638
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135111
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156505
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449806
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1179277
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649246
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672262
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799296
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1894784
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011732
So many postings, so little discussion.