Programming Quotes - Page 8

• At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

  Tony Hoare

  Determination, Learning, Code Quality

  "The Emperor's Old Clothes". Communications of the ACM 24, dl.acm.org. February 1981.

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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.

  David Gelernter

  Technology, Simplicity, Important

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• It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes.

  Keith Braithwaite

  Mistake, Coders, Curious

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• Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated.

  Niklaus Wirth

  Design, Example, Development

  "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement". Communications of the ACM, Vol. 14, No. 4, sunnyday.mit.edu. April 1971.

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• If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

  Brian Kernighan

  Clever, Writing, Debugging

  Brian W. Kernighan, P. J. Plauger (1978). “The Elements of Programming Style”, Computing McGraw-Hill

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• Every parent in America has the total power to control all television programming that is dispatched to their home today.

  Jack Valenti

  Home, Power, America

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• The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

  Fred Brooks

  Media, Creating, Air

  "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering". Book by Fred Brooks, 1975.

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• Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

  Fred Brooks

  Thinking, Perfection, Requirements

  "The Mythical Man-Month". Book by Fred Brooks, 1975.

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• A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

  Marvin Minsky

  Typewriters, Trying, Sound

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• I don't have any focus groups on talent and programming. If I need five people in a mall to be paid $40 to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn't do my job.

  Roger Ailes

  Jobs, People, Focus

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• We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail.

  Hal Abelson

  Learning, Mean, Ideas

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• Computer Science is a science of abstraction -creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.

  Alfred Aho

  Learning, Creating, Technique

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• I, myself, have had many failures and I've learned that if you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be -you aren't stretching your imagination.

  John Backus

  Learning, Imagination, Creative

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• I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.

  Jacques Barzun

  Book, Writing, Learning

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I skip through the programming to watch the commercials.

  Mel Karmazin

  Watches, Skip

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• Our legislation addresses broadcasts over the public airwaves, but I hope the cable and satellite industries see the importance of this issue and voluntarily create a family tier of programming and offer culturally responsible products.

  Charles W. Pickering

  Issues, Addresses, Responsible

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• To devise an information processing system capable of getting along on its own - it must handle its own problems of programming, bookkeeping, communication and coordination with its users. It must appear to its users as a single, integrated personality.

  Cliff Shaw

  Communication, Information Processing, Personality

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• I have no idea how to become successful in children's tv programming today other than to say that whereever you find that rare animal being pursued, insert yourself into its environment; get in the door in any position and work from within.

  William Jackson

  Children, Successful, Animal

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• After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field.

  W. Richard Stevens

  Fields, Graduates

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