Science Quote by Niklaus Wirth

Wirth’s line reads like a mild understatement, but it smuggles in a whole philosophy of computing: discipline over cleverness, method over magic. “Evidently necessary” isn’t just scientific modesty; it’s a quiet rebuke to the romantic idea that solutions arrive fully formed. In software, intuition is cheap, bugs are expensive, and the only reliable path is to treat problem-solving as an engineered process.

The phrasing “generate and test candidates” matters. It frames programming as guided search: you don’t hunt for The Answer, you produce plausible options, then let evidence (tests, proofs, constraints, runtime behavior) kill the bad ones. That’s a stance against improvisational hacking and against purely theoretical purity, too. Wirth is insisting on a loop that includes creation and verification, not one or the other.

“Systematic manner” is the real payload. Coming from the designer of Pascal and a lifelong advocate of structured programming, it signals an ethical preference: humans are fallible, so our methods must compensate. The subtext is a critique of ad hoc development cultures where debugging substitutes for design, and where hero programmers “just know.” It also anticipates modern practices Wirth didn’t need to name for the point to land: unit tests, property-based testing, CI, formal methods, iterative refinement.

Contextually, it sits inside a 20th-century push to make software more like civil engineering and less like folklore. The sentence is plain because it’s meant to be unavoidable: if you can’t describe how you’ll generate and test solutions, you don’t have a plan, you have a hope.