Recent posts
- It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
- I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
- If we’d asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses”.
- I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested in artificial limbs: they are missing one.
- A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
- It’s all talk until the code runs.
- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
- We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.
- The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users.
- Good software, like good wine, takes time.
- Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
- Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer.
- What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form.
- Once the computers got control, we might never get it back.
- A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
- Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.
- C++ certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee.
- No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.
- The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere 'calculating machines.' It holds a position wholly its own, and the considerations it suggests are more interesting in their nature.
- The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.