Programming Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• When a pianist sits down and does a virtuoso performance he is in a technical sense transmitting more information to a machine than any other human activity involving machinery allows.

  Robert Moog

  Doe, Machines, Down And

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• Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

  Nicholas Negroponte

  Learning, Technology, Computer Literacy

  Nicholas Negroponte (2015). “Being Digital”, p.6, Vintage

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• The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Criminal Mind, Spirituality

  Friedrich Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale (1996). “Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”, p.182, Cambridge University Press

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• I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

  Blaise Pascal

  Time, Learning, Usual

  Lettres Provinciales no. 16 (1657) See Thoreau 34; WoodrowWilson 25

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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 hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

  Fred Brooks

  Learning, Essence, Arriving

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• Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.

  Alan Perlis

  Fun, Philosophy, Bittersweet

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• Learning to code makes kids feel empowered, creative, and confident. If we want our young women to retain these traits into adulthood, a great option is to expose them to computer programming in their youth.

  Susan Wojcicki

  Kids, Creative, Want

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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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• Responsible Development shares many practices with XP but the roots are different. Responsible Development's values are honesty, transparency, accountability and responsibility. These lead me to pairing, test-first, incremental design, continuous integration and so on because they support the values.

  Kent Beck

  Honesty, Responsibility, Practice

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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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• … 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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• We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

  Carl Sagan

  Motivational, Education, Ignorance

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.49, Ballantine Books

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• Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

  George Santayana

  Fashion, Political, Innovation

  1905-6 The Life of Reason,'Reason in Religion'.

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• The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

  Eric Schmidt

  Humanity, Criminals, Criminal Mind

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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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• Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

  Virginia Woolf

  Funny, Humor, Happened

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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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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• Dakin (to Irwin, his teacher): Do you really believe that, sir, or are you just trying to make us think?

  Anthony Bennett

  Teacher, Believe, Learning

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• Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

  George Bernard Shaw

  Forgiveness, Believe, Law

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  We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

  Alan Turing

  Travel, Distance, Needs

  Alan Mathison Turing, B. J. Copeland (2004). “The Essential Turing”, p.463, Oxford University Press

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• Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

  Alan Turing

  Machines, Surprise, Take Me

  "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Mind - A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, Volume 59, No. 236, p. 450, 1950.

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• Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

  Roger Ebert

  Reading, Library Research, Rats

  "Critical Eye". Yahoo! Internet Life, September 1998.

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• Responsible Development is the style of development I aspire to now. It can be summarized by answering the question, How would I develop if it were my money? I'm amazed how many theoretical arguments evaporate when faced with this question.

  Kent Beck

  Style, Development, Argument

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