Computer Language Quotes - Page 7

• A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

  Grace Hopper

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  1987 Address at Trinity College, Washington. Reported in Time, 22 Jun.

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• The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

  Hans Hofmann

  Inspirational, Business, Mean

  1967 Search for the Real.

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• For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

  Bill Bryson

  Stupid, Smart, Technology

  "Notes from a Big Country" / "I'm a Stranger Here Myself", Book by Bill Bryson, 1998.

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• There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

  Tony Hoare

  Witty, Humorous, Simple

  "The Emperor's Old Clothes". Communications of the ACM 24 (2), (pp. 75-83), February 1981.

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• The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Witty, Humorous, Teaching

  "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" by Edsger Dijkstra, June 18, 1975.

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• If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.

  Robert Sewell

  Java, Garbage, Execution

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• There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

  Alan Perlis

  Writing, Errors, Two

  "Epigrams on Programming". ACM "SIGPLAN" Notices 17 (9), (pp. 7-13), September 1982.

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• Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

  Brian Kernighan

  Inspirational, Funny, Smart

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  Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

  Bill Gates

  Success, Trust, Leadership

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• Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

  Stan Kelly-Bootle

  Funny Inspirational, Technology, Compromise

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• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

  Donald Knuth

  Funny Inspirational, Bugs, Computer

  Memorandum to Peter van Emde Boas, 29 Mar. 1977

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• There are two types of computer languages; those that people hate and those that nobody uses.

  John Ousterhout

  Hate, Two, People

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• The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

  Paul Vixie

  Plato, Real, Errors

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• Certainly, because the computer and computer language was still not as common as it is today. That's one of the reasons I believe Tron wasn't as popular back then as it is today.

  Bruce Boxleitner

  Believe, Today, Common

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• We can think of descriptions almost as computer languages, an operative description that only deals with very simple operations. Its code is sex - Male, female, dark, light, up down, in out - its the language of duality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Sex, Dark, Simple

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• The proof of a high education is the ability to speak about complex matters as simply as possible.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Learning, Matter, Speak

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• The first step in fixing a broken program is getting it to fail repeatably [on the simplest example possible].

  Tom Duff

  Learning, Broken, Example

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• A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Learning, Thinking, Profound

  Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1976). “A Discipline of Programming”, Prentice Hall

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• Question authority; but, raise your hand first.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Learning, Hands, Firsts

  Alan M. Dershowitz (1992). “Chutzpah”, p.184, Simon and Schuster

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• The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.

  Andrei Codrescu

  Real, Learning, Technology

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• Successful software always gets changed.

  Fred Brooks

  Learning, Successful, Programming

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• Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

  Fred Brooks

  Learning, Scientist, Programming

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• The sole justification of teaching, of the school itself, is that the student comes out of it able to do something he could not do before. I say do and not know, because knowledge that doesn't lead to doing something new or doing something better is not knowledge at all.

  Jacques Barzun

  Teaching, Learning, School

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• Text is linear; it is black and white; it doesn't zoom around the page in 3-D; it isn't intelligent by itself; in fact, in terms of immediate reaction it is quite boring. I can't imagine a single preliterate was ever wowed at the first sight of text, and yet text has been the basis of arguably the most fundamental intellectual transformation of the human species. It and its subforms, such as algebra, have made science education for all a plausible goal.

  Andrea diSessa

  Learning, Black And White, Intelligent

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• Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.

  David Gelernter

  Beautiful, Learning, Winning

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