``May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you
succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into
understanding, and understanding into wisdom.''
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra,
address to the graduates of the College of Natural Sciences of the
University of Texas at Austin, 8 December, 1996.
``Unfortunately, most programmers like to play with new toys. I have
many friends who, immediately upon buying a snakebite kit, would be
tempted to throw the first person they see to the ground, tie the
tourniquet on him, slash him with the knife, and apply suction to the
wound.''
-- Jon Bentley, writing efficient programs
``I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no
deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there
are no obvious deficiencies.''
-- C. A. R. Hoare
``It doesn't matter if you're ugly or graceless or even half crazy, if
you produce right results in this world, your colleagues must accept
you. It's an exciting environment to contemplate; you can change the
way people think if you can provide the right reason, and you can
predict the way in which others may change you. Since there are only
right or wrong answers to questions, technical disputes among
engineers must always have resolutions. It follows that no emnity
should proceed from a dispute among engineers''.
-- Tracy Kidder, The soul of a new machine, p146
The attitude adopted in this book is that while we expect to get
numbers out of the machine, we also expect to take action based on
them, and, therefore we need to understand thoroughly what numbers
may, or may not, mean. To cite the author's favorite motto,
``The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers,''
although some people claim,
``The purpose of computing numbers is not yet in sight.''
There is an innate risk in computing because ``to compute is to
sample, and one then enters the domain of statistics with all its
uncertainties.''
-- Richard W. Hamming, Introduction to applied numerical analysis,
McGraw-Hill 1971, p31.
``Don't get me started on intuitive. You know what's intuitive?
Fear of heights. Everything else we call intuitive, such as walking or using
a pencil took years of practice. Is that what we want? A control that takes
years of practice?''
-- Donald Norman, Risks Digest 22.02, 2002.
``Ash C++ durbatuluk, ash C++ gimbatul,
ash C++ thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul!''
-- Nicholas C. Weaver, usenet sig
``Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.''
-- Vernon Schryver
``I'd use Plan 9 before I'd use bitfields.''
-- Peter Weinberger, the Plan 9 fortune file
``An analogy is like instant coffee---it can wake you up,
but it isn't the real thing.''
-- Peter da Silva, usenet sig
``What is literature about? Literature is a conversation in
writing about important ideas. That's why Euclid's Elements and
Newton's Principia Mathematica are as much a part of the Western
world's tradition of great books as Plato's Dialogues. But
somehow we've come to think of science and mathematics as being
apart from literature. In spite of the fact that our society is
built largely on the technologies that come out of understanding
science and math, we've ceased to regard literacy about these
things as important. And that's a big mistake.
Literacy is not just about being able to read street signs or
medicine labels. It means being able to deal in the world of
ideas. In a democratic society you need people to be in
conversational contact with the important ideas of the past and
of the present, which means being able to read about them and
write about them and talk about them. It's obvious that the
American educational system has fallen far short of reaching
that goal.''
-- Alan Kay, http://www.honco.net/os/kay.html
``Authenticate locally, authorize globally.''
-- Ken Klingenstein
``The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it
does not solve the problem well.''
-- Phil Wadler POPL 2003
``Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of
dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs,
ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity,
and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.''
-- Walt Whitman, Slang in America