20th-century Computer Scientist Quotes

Alan Turing

Tim Berners-Lee

Donald Knuth

Larry Page

Dennis Ritchie

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Konrad Zuse

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

Tim Berners-Lee

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

What you don't want is a product to be cool. You want it to be a part of people's everyday life.

Enterprise engineering is rooted in both the organizational sciences and the information system sciences. In our current understanding, three concepts are paramount to the theoretical and practical pursuit of enterprise engineering: enterprise ontology, enterprise architecture, and enterprise governance.

The adverse impact on development productivity of requiring programmers to navigate along access paths to reach target data [...] was enormous. In addition, it was not possible to make slight changes in the layout in storage without simultaneously having to revise all programs that relied on the previous structure. [...] As a result, far too much manpower was being invested in continual (and avoidable) maintenance of application programs.

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet's future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger.

If you look at things like Google Now also. Maybe you want to just have [a question] answered for you before you ask it.

Principle of causality is fundamental to human thinking, and it has been observed experimentally that this assumption leads to complex hypothesis formation by human subjects attempting to solve comparatively simple problems involving a causal randomly generated events

Brian R. Gaines

About PL/I:

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.

The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it.
The Second Rule of Program Optimization – For experts only: Don't do it yet.

Michael A. Jackson

To a modern mathematician design seems to be a second rate intellectual activity

George Forsythe

And programming computers was so fascinating. You create your own little universe, and then it does what you tell it to do.

Scientific customers are traditionally less worried about reprogramming efforts than commercial customers, since many jobs are of a research nature and will be done over from time to time anyway. This is obviously true of many small and 'lone shot problems. In practice, however, there are many more machine hours spent on production-type scientific problems than on those of research-type at most scientific computing installations. These production problems can be as rigid and static as any commercial job. The scientists responsible for production work will complain about reprogramming just as violently as an accountant will under the same circumstances.

Zappa was not a protester or an activist. He was merely a man who used his brain.

The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday.

Information retrieval is the name for the process or method whereby a prospective user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in storage containing information useful to him. It is the finding or discovery process with respect to stored information. It is another, more general, name for the production of a demand bibliography. Information retrieval embraces the intellectual aspects of the description of information and its specification for search, and also whatever systems, technique, or machines that are employed to carry out the operation. Information retrieval is crucial to documentation and organization of knowledge.

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

The concept of the computing universe is still just a hypothesis; nothing has been proved. However, I am confident that this idea can help unveil the secrets of nature.

Today some evidence arises that UML will more and more be used not as a specification language but as a high level programming language. This has some advantages, as if the concepts of UML are executable, they can immediately be animated and tested, or the generated code even be used as implementation. Thus UML probably will have an implementation-oriented semantics describing this animation.

The World is more complicated than most of our theories make it out to be.

Edmund Berkeley

It's amazing how we can do things simultaneously, like talking and not listening.

Artificial Life is concerned with tuning the behaviors of such low-level machines that the behavior that emerges at the global level is essentially the same as some behavior exhibited by a natural living system... Artificial Life is concerned with generating lifelike behavior.

I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.