Computer Scientist Quotes

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.

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

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

George Forsythe

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I deny any government, elected or not, the right to kidnap my children and ship them off to a battlefield to kill or be killed. I accept to pay taxes and that's the sum total of my debt to my government. In every other respect, my government owes me, not the other way around. Conscription is the most fundamental denial of liberty, on a par with slavery. I am not a pacifist and I support a professional army. But I oppose the draft even in times of war. If your country cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself when attacked, then it's not worth defending.

Bernard Chazelle

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

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.

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

As Hamlet tells his friend, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'' Well then, we must try harder to dream!

Gregory Chaitin

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.

And so it is that we come to the end of our journey through the periodic table not with a bang, but with a committee.

It is not that you cannot understand it, it is that you cannot compute it.

Carlos Gershenson

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

As more and more good ideas come under the protection of patents, it may become increasingly unlikely that any one program can incorporate the state of the art in user-interface design without sinking into a quagmire of unending royalty payments and legal battles.

Nathaniel Borenstein

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]...

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

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

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.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

Brian Kernighan

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

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