20th-century Computer Scientist Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

George Forsythe

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

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.

We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.

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.

For every dollar spent in failure, learn a dollar's worth of lesson.

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

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

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.

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

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

Software engineering is the part of computer science which is too difficult for the computer scientist.

Friedrich Bauer

Start by putting yourself in your users' shoes. Why are they coming to your site? If you look at most Web sites, you'd presume that the answer is "User is extremely bored and wishes to stare at a blank screen for several minutes while a flashing icon loads, then stare at the flashing icon for a few more minutes."

Philip Greenspun

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.