Recent posts
- LISP has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
- An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.
- The button is working, only, it cannot be seen.
- Don't worry about anything. Just do what you can and be the best you can be.
- The business of software building isn't really high-tech at all. It's most of all a business of talking to each other and writing things down.
- In programming the hard part isn’t solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve.
- The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.
- People under pressure don’t work better; they just work faster.
- My main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.
- Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
- We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty.
- Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
- Less code equals less bugs.
- As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.
- The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.
- We have already mentioned what may, perhaps, appear paradoxical to some of our readers, — that the division of labour can be applied with equal success to mental as to mechanical operations, and that it ensures in both the same economy of time.
- On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
- As long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem.
- The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
- If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.