Programming Quotes - Page 11

• We don't have much time, so we don't teach them; we acquaint them with things that they can learn.

  Charles E. Leiserson

  Learning, Teach

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• Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages.

  James Lovelock

  Country, Book, Writing

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• Any noun can be verbed.

  Alan Perlis

  Learning, Nouns, English Language

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• Gates has always understood Moore's Law better than anyone else in the industry. If you can make something run at all, get it out there -it may be slow and clunky, but hardware improvements will bail you out. If you wait until it's running perfectly on the hardware already in the field, it will be obsolete before it's released. This philosophy built Microsoft and is the main reason Microsoft won the war IBM declared back in the OS/2 days.

  Jerry Pournelle

  Running, Philosophy, War

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• Questions are the important thing, answers are less important. Learning to ask a good question is the heart of intelligence. Learning the answer-well, answers are for students. Questions are for thinkers.

  Roger Schank

  Learning, Heart, Important

  Roger C. Schank (1991). “The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent”, Pocket Books

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• There is one very good reason to learn programming, but it has nothing to do with preparing for high-tech careers or with making sure one is computer literate in order to avoid being cynically manipulated by the computers of the future. The real value of learning to program can only be understood if we look at learning to program as an exercise of the intellect, as a kind of modern-day Latin that we learn to sharpen our minds.

  Roger Schank

  Real, Latin, Learning

  Roger C. Schank, Peter G. Childers (1984). “The cognitive computer: on language, learning, and artificial intelligence”, Addison-Wesley

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• Microsoft knows that reliable software is not cost effective. According to studies, 90% to 95% of all bugs are harmless. They're never discovered by users, and they don't affect performance. It's much cheaper to release buggy software and fix the 5% to 10% of bugs people find and complain about.

  Bruce Schneier

  Learning, People, Complaining

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• And simple truth miscalled simplicity

  William Shakespeare

  Learning, Simple, Simplicity

  Sonnet 66

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• In engineering, as in other creative arts, we must learn to do analysis to support our efforts in synthesis. One cannot build a beautiful and functional bridge without a knowledge of steel and dirt, and a considerable mathematical technique for using this knowledge to compute the properties of structures. Similarly, one cannot build a beautiful computer system without a deep understanding of how to "previsualize" the process generated by the code one writes.

  Gerald Jay Sussman

  Beautiful, Art, Writing

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• By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Learning, Race, Brain

  Alfred North Whitehead (1958). “An Introduction to Mathematics”, p.39, New York : Oxford University Press, 1958 [c1948]

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• Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Learning, Mean, Used

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• While Microsoft does not share all of Oracle's ambitions for Java, we agree that it is a very valuable tool for software developers.

  Bill Gates

  Ambition, Doe, Tools

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• There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with... nobody can ever improve the software.

  Bill Gates

  Software, Disagree

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• The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

  William Gibson

  Lying, Writing, Vanity

  William Gibson @GreatDismal, twitter.com. May 31, 2009.

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• Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.

  George Gilder

  Three, Computer, Faster

  George Gilder (2000). “Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World”, p.265, Simon and Schuster

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• Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

  I. J. Good

  Clever, Men, Design

  "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine". Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965.

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• All of us who attended the meeting - including Microsoft - unanimously agreed that unilaterally extending the Java programming language would hurt compatibility among Java tools and programs, would injure other tools vendors and would damage customers' ability to run a Java-based software product on whatever platform they wished.

  James Gosling

  Running, Hurt, Tools

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• You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves - those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing.

  James Gosling

  People, Use, World

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• In the Java world, security is not viewed as an add-on a feature. It is a pervasive way of thinking. Those who forget to think in a secure mindset end up in trouble. But just because the facilities are there doesn't mean that security is assured automatically. A set of standard practices has evolved over the years. The Secure Coding Standard for Java is a compendium of these practices. These are not theoretical research papers or product marketing blurbs. This is all serious, mission-critical, battle-tested, enterprise-scale stuff.

  James Gosling

  Mean, Thinking, Years

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• Don't worry about how things are. Watch where they are headed.

  Fred Green

  Worry, Watches

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• Experimental evidence is the final arbiter of right and wrong.

  Brian Greene

  Finals, Evidence, Arbiter

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• It [AI] would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.

  Stephen Hawking

  Would Be, Evolution, Artificial Intelligence

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• Stupidity is the only natural capital offense.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Stupidity, Natural, Offense

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• Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?

  Bill Joy

  Technology, Technological Development, Asking

  "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" by Bill Joy, www.wired.com. April 1, 2000.

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• The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.

  Bill Joy

  Art, Mean, People

  "Creating One Huge Computer". Interview with Spencer Reiss, www.wired.com. July 15, 1998.

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