Programming Quotes - Page 10

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

  Linus Torvalds

  Inspiring, Thinking, Inspire

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• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Science, Technology, Possible And Impossible

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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• Programming is an explanatory activity.

  Roman Harper

  Learning, Activity

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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."

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• 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.

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

  Tony Hoare

  Trust, Top Down, Beginners

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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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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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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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• 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.

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• 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

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

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Learning, Mean, Used

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• ...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

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• 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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• 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

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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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• 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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