Programming Quotes - Page 10

• If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

  Linus Torvalds

  Inspiring, Thinking, Inspire

  14 Copy quote

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Science, Technology, Possible And Impossible

  Letter to the editor, Science, 19 Jan. 1968.

  79 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.

  Steve McConnell

  Funny Inspirational, Errors, Coders

  11 Copy quote

• The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

  Nathaniel Borenstein

  Humorous, Learning, Agreement

  9 Copy quote

• Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

  Linus Torvalds

  Data, Worry, Structure

  Message to Git Mailing List, lwn.net. July 27, 2006.

  76 Copy quote

  Show source

• Programming is an explanatory activity.

  Roman Harper

  Learning, Activity

  11 Copy quote

• If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Debugging, Want, Waste

  "The Humble Programmer". Edsger Dijkstra's ACM Turing Award lecture, "Communications of the ACM", Volume 15, No. 10, www.cs.utexas.edu. October 1972.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Ideas, Engineering

  "Disturbing the Universe". Book by Freeman Dyson, 1979.

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Problem, Realizing, Innovative

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.40, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.

  Tony Hoare

  Trust, Top Down, Beginners

  15 Copy quote

• John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Learning, Simple, Attention

  10 Copy quote

• Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Wise, Learning, Space

  "A Case against the GO TO Statement" by Edsger Dijkstra, 1968.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Learning, Mean, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Learning, Osmosis, Design

  16 Copy quote

• The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Learning, Language, Problem

  "New Textbooks for the "New" Mathematics". Richard P. Feynman, "Engineering and Science", Volume 28, No. 6, March 1965.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• When the problem [quantum chromodynamics] is finally solved, it will all be by imagination. Then there will be some big thing about the great way it was done. But it's simple -it will all be by imagination, and persistence.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Learning, Persistence, Simple

  7 Copy quote

• When a Caltech student asked the eminent cosmologist Michael Turner what his "bias" was in favoring one or another particle as a likely candidate to compromise dark matter in the universe, Feynmann snapped, "Why do you want to know his bias? Form your own bias!"

  Richard P. Feynman

  Learning, Dark, Want

  7 Copy quote

• Good programmers know what's beautiful and bad ones don't.

  David Gelernter

  Beautiful, Learning, Programmers

  7 Copy quote

• This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does.

  Timothy Gowers

  Attitude, Learning, Doe

  10 Copy quote

• Incidentally, when we're faced with a "prove or disprove," we're usually better off trying first to disprove with a counterexample, for two reasons: A disproof is potentially easier (we need just one counterexample); and nitpicking arouses our creative juices. Even if the given assertion is true, our search for a counterexample often leads to a proof, as soon as we see why a counterexample is impossible. Besides, it's healthy to be skeptical.

  Ronald Graham

  Learning, Creative Juices, Two

  Ronald L. Graham, Donald Ervin Knuth, Oren Patashnik (1989). “Concrete mathematics: a foundation for computer science”, Addison Wesley Publishing Company

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the particular is contained the universal.

  James Joyce

  Learning, Particular, Universal

  James Joyce (2016). “Stephen Hero & A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Two Autobiographical Novels): Including Biography of the Author”, p.386, e-artnow

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them, and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details.

  John G. Kemeny

  Distance, Learning, Views

  7 Copy quote

• ...methods are more important than facts. The educational value of a problem given to a student depends mostly on how often the thought processes that are invoked to solve it will be helpful in later situations. It has little to do with how useful the answer to the problem may be. On the other hand, a good problem must also motivate the students; they should be interested in seeing the answer. Since students differ so greatly, I cannot expect everyone to like the problems that please me.

  Donald Knuth

  Educational, Learning, Hands

  28 Copy quote

• ...One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that SOFTWARE IS HARD. From now on I shall have significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks.

  Donald Knuth

  Book, Writing, Learning

  12 Copy quote