20th-century Computer Scientist Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I deny any government, elected or not, the right to kidnap my children and ship them off to a battlefield to kill or be killed. I accept to pay taxes and that's the sum total of my debt to my government. In every other respect, my government owes me, not the other way around. Conscription is the most fundamental denial of liberty, on a par with slavery. I am not a pacifist and I support a professional army. But I oppose the draft even in times of war. If your country cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself when attacked, then it's not worth defending.

Bernard Chazelle

I'm a future-hacker; I'm trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought.

This ambiguity is another example of a growing problem with mathematical notation: There aren't enough squiggles to go around.

I remain convinced that neither religion nor science has everything figured out.

In a world filled with violence, hatred, and suspicion, giving is an expression of faith, trust, and concern.

Douglas A. Lawson

A manager's most important work is helping the people doing the work. Give them a goal and let them work. Remove any impediments that get in their way. Do anything that make them more effective or productive. Then the organization can capitalize on the fruits of their work.

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal - Panama

Guy L. Steele Jr.

Pascal and C are special-purpose languages for manipulating the registers and memory of a von Neumann-style computer.

The old computing was about what computers could do; the new computing is about what users can do. Successful technologies are those that are in harmony with users' needs. They must support relationships and activities that enrich the users' experiences.

Ben Shneiderman

Whatever one may think about engineers, one must admit they write clearly, to the point, and engagingly. They have realized long ago that if you wish the reader to follow rather than decipher, the linear deductive technique of exposition is the worst.

Jacob T. Schwartz

The fact is, when you look at the best teams—like the ones that existed at Toyota or 3M when Takeuchi or Nonaka wrote their paper, or the ones at Google or Salesforce.com or Amazon today—there isn't this separation of roles.

Jeff Sutherland

We Reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We Believe In: rough consensus and running code.

Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable

Per Brinch Hansen

The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees - to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.

Scientists nowadays rarely know how to read seriously. They are accustomed to strip-mining a paper to get the facts out and then moving on, not to mollycoddling the thing in search of nuances; there probably aren't any.

David Gelernter

The nature of the hybrid research/design model means that we often can see design efforts as attempts not to concretize the outcomes of research but instead to justify, promote, or initiate them

The quantum world is a world of waves, not particles. So we have to think of electron waves and proton waves and so on. Matter is 'incoherent' when all its waves have a different wavelength, implying a different momentum. On the other hand, if you take a pure quantum system – the electrons in a superconducting magnet, or the atoms in a laser – they are all in phase with one another, and they demonstrate the wave nature of matter on a large scale. Then you can see quite visibly what matter is down at its heart.

There are three things a man must do before his life is done; Write two lines in APL, And make the buggers run.

Stan Kelly-Bootle

We try to solve the problem by rushing through the design process so that enough time is left at the end of the project to uncover the errors that were made because we rushed through the design process