American Computer Scientist Quotes

Donald Knuth

Larry Page

Dennis Ritchie

Grace Hopper

Vint Cerf

Randy Pausch

Fred Brooks

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.

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

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement

Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. […] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

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

It is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

Fernando J. Corbató

It is, therefore, possible to extend a partially specified interpretation to a complete interpretation, without loss of verifiability, [...] This fact offers the possibility of automatic verification of programs, the programmer merely tagging entrances and one edge in each innermost loop.

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

George Forsythe

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

If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you've just proven a natural law!

I expected too much of educators. I expected them to understand, in a sense, the sugar-coated concepts of LISP used in AI that were embodied in the Logo language. It was then that I learned that computers were built to make money, not minds.

The ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate all need for intelligent thought.

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

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.

If we take a small step in extolling peacemakers as much as honoring war heroes, we will be making a giant leap towards peace.

It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a 'thinking center' that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval.
The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.

J. C. R. Licklider

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

National law has no place in cyberlaw. Where is cyberspace? If you don't like banking laws in the United States, set up your machine on the Grand Cayman Islands. Don't like the copyright laws in the United States? Set up your machine in China. Cyberlaw is global law, which is not going to be easy to handle, since we seemingly cannot even agree on world trade of automobile parts.

Nicholas Negroponte

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

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

If I was able to tell my story with the passion I felt, my lecture might help others find a path to fulfilling their own dreams.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

In some ways, I believe that we are moving into a post-historical period, for lack of a better term. A time when whatever functioned previously will cease to function, or at least will have to be re-thought and re-considered.

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

If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly I would not recommend, you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago.