Programming Quotes - Page 4

• I believe any malevolent supercivilisation would have rapidly self-destructed as we may be in the process of doing ourselves. If we do have contact, physical contact with aliens, I think it will be benign.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Believe, Thinking, Self

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• Beauty is our business.

  Edsger Dijkstra

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• Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Writing, Order, Paper

  "My hopes of computing science" by Edsger Dijkstra, www.cs.utexas.edu. April 1979.

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• I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Needs, Waste, Computer

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

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• Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Fall, Views, Average

  Edsger W. Dijkstra (2012). “Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective”, p.163, Springer Science & Business Media

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• How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Luxury, People, Simplicity

  Edsger W. Dijkstra (2012). “Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective”, p.347, Springer Science & Business Media

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• If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Depth, Behind You, Blame

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• Have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.

  Freeman Dyson

  Stars, Rocks, Hands

  "The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb". Documentary film, 1981.

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• The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward.

  Freeman Dyson

  Moving, Years, Data

  "Freeman Dyson forecasts the future" by Freeman Dyson, www.newscientist.com. November 2006.

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• I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

  Bill Joy

  Thinking, Mass Destruction, Evil

  "Be very afraid of the future", www.theguardian.com. March 18, 2000.

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• The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.

  Alan Kay

  Real, Romance, Revolution

  "Alan Kay, Computing Pioneer". moniker.net. September 03, 2013.

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• The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

  Donald Knuth

  Digital, Computer, Program

  Donald E. Knuth (1997). “The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms”, p.6, Addison-Wesley Professional

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• I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

  Donald Knuth

  People, Patents, Use

  "The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 3: Sorting and Searching". Book by Donald E. Knuth, 1973.

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• Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.

  Donald Knuth

  May, Facts, Helping

  Donald Ervin Knuth (2008). “The Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental algorithms”

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• There is one brain organ that is optimised for understanding and articulating logical processes and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Understanding, Brain, Development

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• By 2009, computers will disappear. Displays will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Eyeglasses, Lenses, Computer

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• If we were magically shrunk and put into someone's brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away and we would be able to describe the workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would not contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers!

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Thinking, Brain, Would Be

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• The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.

  Terence McKenna

  Cutting, Intelligent, Feet

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• In network theory, the value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.

  Robert Metcalfe

  Squares, Numbers, Theory

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• Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs.

  Dave Cutler

  Junk, Phds, Unix

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• I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"

  Tom Van Vleck

  Writing, Recovery, Errors

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• Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

  Rob Pike

  Smell, Starting, Unix

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• Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

  Erik Naggum

  People, Delight, Novelty

  "Ousterhout and Tcl lost the plot with latest paper". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. September 4, 1997.

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• … what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering”.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Maturity, Engineering, Snakes

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• In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Book, Writing, Numbers

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