Computer Scientist Quotes

Alan Turing

Tim Berners-Lee

Donald Knuth

Larry Page

Dennis Ritchie

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Konrad Zuse

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.

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

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

The 'name' of a resource indicates what we seek, an 'address' indicates where it is, and a 'route' tells us how to get there.

The notion of "intricate and beautiful complexities" is almost an oxymoron. Unix programmers vie with each other for "simple and beautiful" honors — a point that's implicit in these rules, but is well worth making overt.

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

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

People embrace false magical theories in the hope something good will come out of them. In the most extreme of these, good comes out of them only at the end of this life, in paradise.

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.

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

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.

Secure web servers are the equivalent of heavy armored cars. The problem is, they are being used to transfer rolls of coins and checks written in crayon by people on park benches to merchants doing business in cardboard boxes from beneath highway bridges. Further, the roads are subject to random detours, anyone with a screwdriver can control the traffic lights, and there are no police.

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

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Robert Wilensky

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

George Forsythe

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.

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

The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance. Evidence for the worldwide fascination with computers is everywhere, from the articles on the financial, and even the front pages of the newspapers, to the difficulties that even the most prestigious universities experience in finding and keeping faculty in computer science. The best professors, instead of teaching bright students, join start-up companies.

Sun is one of many US companies that file software patents regularly, the reason we file software patents regularly is the same reason that Americans buy guns. Americans buy guns, because Americans buy guns. American corporations file software patents because American corporations file software patents.

Constructs extraneous to the real world should be eliminated from the analysis model. They may be needed later during design, but not now. For example, CPU subroutine, process, algorithm, and interrupt are implementation constructs for most applications [and should be excluded from the analysis model]...

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

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

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.

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.

There is a tendency to throw computers at third world problems, which I think is often a distraction. Putting computers in the schools is great, but it may be more important to put teachers in the schools.