Programming Quotes - Page 24

• The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Silly, Effort, Mind

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• It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Giving, Tasks, Needs

  "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" by Edsger Dijkstra, www.cs.utexas.edu. November 28, 2000.

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• We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!

  Edsger Dijkstra

  People, Giving, Advice

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

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• Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.

  Plato

  Learning, Thinking, Mind

  Plato (2013). “Plato's Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist”, p.318, Courier Corporation

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• Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

  Herbert Simon

  Teacher, Learning, Thinking

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• Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.

  Herbert Simon

  Writing, Learning, Training

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• EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.

  Richard Stallman

  Learning, Sight, Editors

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• Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

  Gerald Weinberg

  Learning, Men, Brain

  Gerald M. Weinberg (2001). “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking”, Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated

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• I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself.

  Oscar Wilde

  Learning, People

  Oscar Wilde (1962). “The letters of Oscar Wilde”

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• Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. (Or, sometimes known by] Grove [the head of Intel] giveth and Gates [the head of Microsoft] taketh away.)

  Niklaus Wirth

  Learning, Microsoft, Sometimes

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• Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

  Alan Perlis

  Two, Purpose, Program

  "Epigrams on Programming". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17 (9), pp. 7-13, pu.inf.uni-tuebingen.de. September 1982.

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• Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about the go to statement. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Believe, Fall, Simple

  "Structured Programming with go to Statements". Donald E. Knuth, "ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)", Volume 6, Issue 4, December 1974.

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• I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

  Larry Wall

  Thinking, Requirements, Computer

  Usenet article "s///e bizarreness", groups.google.com. January 4, 1991.

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• It's quite similar to guitar solos, only with programming you have to use your brain. The most important thing is that it should have some emotional effect on me, rather than just, 'Oh, that's really clever.'

  Aphex Twin

  Clever, Emotional, Should Have

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I've been in entertainment, politics, business, business coaching, public affairs, documentaries, programming, news, theater. So, there aren't many things I see that I haven't seen something like that before.

  Roger Ailes

  Coaching, News, Documentaries

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• We live in a media soup and are constantly being programmed or are fighting that programming. Thus any truthful account of a life, every part of a life, is about society as well as an individual.

  Marge Piercy

  Fighting, Media, Soup

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.

  Linus Torvalds

  Knowing, Want, Kind

  Source: www.linuxfocus.org

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• I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Thinking, World

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.

  Larry Wall

  Writing, Recipes, Ingredients

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters, and the fact that Linux has had a huge impact on the tech market and is used virtually everywhere is obviously very personally satisfying. I think programming is fun, and the community around the kernel is great, but a project has to be relevant too.

  Linus Torvalds

  Fun, Thinking, Impact

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.

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• A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes.

  Hal Abelson

  Powerful, Mean, Ideas

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• The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Art, Complexity

  "Notes On Structured Programming" by Edsger Dijkstra, April 1970.

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• Programming is a Dark Art, and it always will be. The programmer is fighting against the two most destructive forces in the universe: entropy and human stupidity. These are not things you can overcome with a "methodology" or on a schedule.

  Damian Conway

  Art, Fighting, Dark

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• The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!

  Richard Stallman

  Real, Writing, People

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• Experience comes from bad judgment.

  Mark Twain

  Learning Something New, Hiking, Climbing

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