Computer Scientist Quotes

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal - Panama

Guy L. Steele Jr.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Reliability engineers often assume that reliability and safety are synonymous, but this assumption is true only in special cases.

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

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.

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.

Asking for efficiency and adaptability in the same program is like asking for a beautiful and modest wife. Although beauty and modesty have been known to occur in the same woman, we'll probably have to settle for one or the other. At least that's better than neither.

Gerald Weinberg

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

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.

Mathematical work does not proceed along the narrow logical path of truth to truth to truth, but bravely or gropingly follows deviations through the surrounding marshland of propositions which are neither simply and wholly true nor simply and wholly false.

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

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

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

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 system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.

Jakob Nielsen (usability consultant)

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

In a world filled with violence, hatred, and suspicion, giving is an expression of faith, trust, and concern.

Douglas A. Lawson

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

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.

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

Brian Kernighan