British Computer Scientist Quotes

Alan Turing

Tim Berners-Lee

C. A. R. Hoare

Maurice Wilkes

E. F. Codd

James Martin

David Gelernter

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

Information Engineering is the application of an interlocking set of formal techniques for the planning, analysis, design, and construction of information systems on the enterprise wide basis or across a major sector of the enterprise.

In the bad old days before MDA, (conceptual) models served only to facilitate communication between customers and developers and act as blueprints for construction. Nowadays, MDA establishes the infrastructure for defining and executing transformations between models of various kinds.

Stephen J. Mellor

Perhaps an underlying cause [of doubt as to the future of information science] is in some cases... the apprehension that information science may become submerged in the larger field of computer science.

Brian Campbell Vickery

When it comes to computer games, many academics seem to be one step down from judges in their lack of engagement with the real world.

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 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 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

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.

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

Dan Dennett once said that if he hadn't become a philosopher, he might have become an engineer. I think Igor [Aleksander] has shown us that the gap between the two professions may be smaller than we think.