20th-century Computer Scientist Quotes

It's hard to lose weight when you're dining on the company's money.

Mathematical work does not proceed along the narrow logical path of truth to truth to truth, but bravely or gropingly follows deviations through the surrounding marshland of propositions which are neither simply and wholly true nor simply and wholly false.

Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, programs written for them usually did not work.

I build things that I think are exciting from a technology standpoint and will help make life easier, simpler and better for people.

An object in OOA represents a single typical but unspecified instance of something in the real world - any airplane, I don't care which one, as long as it is typical. The object-oriented analyst distinguishes this concept from that of a specified instance: Airplane number N2713A, Air Force One, or The Spirit of St. Louis, for example.

Probabilities are summaries of knowledge that is left behind when information is transferred to a higher level of abstraction.

The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has been the listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension; an alarming increase of packaged language (cliches used in speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute visual media (especially television and video) for written language.

There's something deeper than making money off stuff. Being part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy

Enterprise architecture (EA) promotes the belief that an enterprise, as a complex system, can be designed or improved in an orderly fashion achieving better overall results than ad-hoc organisation and design. EA is a co-operative effort of designers, analysts and managers and uses enterprise models in the process... enterprise models carry meaning. This resulted in requirements for the enterprise engineering process, which—if not met—can limit the viability of the process. The analysis of the same factors resulted in requirements for improved Enterprise Modelling Tools.

A pattern is a fully realized form original, or model accepted or proposed for imitation. With patterns, small piecework is standardized into a larger chunk or unit. Patterns become the building blocks for design and construction. Finding and applying patterns indicates progress in a field of human endeavor.

We have a lot of work to do. We have 90% of PC [market] share and 14% of total device share. We get that,

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.

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.

Among the formal graphical methods are Frege's (1879) Begriffsschrift, Peirce's (1909) existential graphs, and Sowa's (1984) conceptual graphs. These three are based in first-order predicate logic.

It is the greatest achievement of a teacher to enable his students to surpass him.

A use case is a complete course of events in the system, seen from a user's perspective.

The artificial intelligence approach may not be altogether the right one to make to the problem of designing automatic assembly devices. Animals and machines are constructed from entirely different materials and on quite different principles. When engineers have tried to draw inspiration from a study of the way animals work they have usually been misled; the history of early attempts to construct flying machines with flapping wings illustrates this very clearly.

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

The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.

Jakob Nielsen (usability consultant)

Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people.

Yukihiro Matsumoto