Random CS Quotes

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors" - Phil Karlton

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable" - Leslie Lamport

"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." - Linus Torvalds

"The best way to prepare as a programmer is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written... You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong" - Bill Gates

"Programing is the act of turning an inexact descrption of something (the specification) into an exact description of the thing (the program)" - Joe Armstrong

"A most important, but also elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits ... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits." - Edsger Dijkstra

"It is not a language's weakness but its strengths that control the gradient of its change: Alas, a language never escapes its embryonic sac" - Alan Perlis

"They know enough who know how to learn" - J. Adams

"All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors." - Anonymous

"The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take." - R. Carlson

"The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other." - John Carmack

“Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.” - Edsger Dijkstra

"... our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible." - Edsger Dijkstra

"Simplificity is prerequisite for reliability" - Edsger Dijkstra

"Precise language is not the problem. Clear language is the problem" - Richard Feynman

" A really good language should be both clean and dirty: cleanly designed, with a small core of well understood and highly orthogonal operators, but dirty in the sense that it lets hackers have their way with it ... A real hacker's language will always have a slightly raffish character." - Paul Graham

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programing" - Tony Hoare

" A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors" - Waldi Ravens

"To iterate is human, to recurse [is] divine" - Peter Deutsch

"Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process. These processes, arising from human experience and thought, are huge in number, intricate in detail, and at any time only partially understood. They are modeled to our permanent satisfaction rarely by our computer programs. Thus even though our programs are carefully handcrafted discrete collections of symbols, mosaics of interlocking functions, they continually evolve: we change them as our perception of the model deepens, enlarges, generalizes until the model ultimately attains a meta-stable place within still another model with which we struggle." - Alan Perlis