Important Quotations in Computing
Learning how to learn is life's most important skill.
- T. Buzan
We think too much about effective methods of teaching and not
enough about effective methods of learning. No matter how good
teaching may be, each student must take the responsibility for his
own education.
- J. Carolus S.J
If you cannot describe what you are doing as a process, you really
don't know what you're doing.
-- W. E. Deming
Computing is not just learning to use technological tools, it is really
about reasoning about complex problems and eventually using a
computing tool (or developing a new one) to solve these problems.
- JG
The person who knows HOW will always have a job. The person
who knows WHY will always be his/her boss.
- Anonymous
Don’t worry about debugging (or testing), think more about a
correct implementation.
- JG
Dakin (to Irwin, his teacher): Do you really believe that, sir, or are
you just trying to make us think?
- A. Bennet (in "The History Boys")
Today, most software exists, not to solve a problem, but to interface
with other software.
- I. O. Angell
If you don't think carefully, you might believe that programming is
just typing statements in a programming language.
- W. Cunningham
Testing can show the presence of errors, but not their absence.
- E. Dijkstra
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
- A. Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- A. Einstein
The proof of a high education is the ability to speak about complex
matters as simply as possible.
- R.W. Emerson
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- M. Forbes
In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena,
the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is
abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities
between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world
and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore,
for the time being, their differences.
-- C.A.R. Hoare
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute.
- H. Abelson and G. Sussman (in "The Structure and Interpretation of
Computer Programs)
They know enough who know how to learn
- J. Adams
Think twice, code once.
- Anonymous
He who asks is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask remains
a fool forever.
- Anonymous Chinese Prover
The first step towards wisdom is calling things by their right names.
- Anonymous Chinese Proverb
There is a division in the student population between those who go
to college to learn and those who go to college to earn a diploma.
- J. Blau (letter to the editor, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 24,
2002)
The American university is built on two false premises: that all
teachers must add to the existing stock of knowledge by research,
and that all self-respecting institutions fulfill this role only by
employing productive scholars...Of course, the teacher must keep
reading and thinking abreast of his time, but this does not mean that
he must write and publish.
The confusion hides a further absurd assumption, which is that
when a man writes a scholarly book that reaches a dozen specialists
he adds immeasurably to the world's knowledge; whereas if he
imparts his thoughts and his reading to one hundred and fifty
students every year, he is wasting his time and leaving the world in
darkness. One is tempted to ask what blinkered pedant ever
launched the notion that students in coming to college seceded from
the human race and may therefore be safely left out when
knowledge is being broadcast.
- J. Barzun ("Teacher in America")
More than the act of testing, the act of designing tests is one of the
best bug preventers known. The thinking that must be done to
create a useful test can discover and eliminate bugs before they are
coded - indeed, test-design thinking can discover and eliminate bugs
at every stage in the creation of software, from conception to
specification, to design, coding and the rest.
- B. Bezier
Software development has been, is, and will likely remain
fundamentally hard. Building quality systems involves an essential
and irreducible complexity, which is why the entire history of
software engineering can be characterized as one of rising levels of
abstraction. As such, the task of the software development team is to
engineer the illusion of simplicity.
- G. Booch (in a blurb from a talk, "The Limits of Software")
Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.
- F. Brooks
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
- L. Da Vinci
Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague...
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new
semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
- E. Dijkstra
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
- E. Dijkstra
Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows
software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives
programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and
construction of complex programs.
- D. Gelernter ("Machine Beauty", Basic Books, 1998)
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
- C.A.R. Hoare
The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.
- C.A.R. Hoare
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that
the necessary may speak.
- H. Hofmann (in "Introduction to the Bootstrap")
Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
- R. Johnson
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
- B. Kernighan
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it.
- D. Knuth
Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading
your mind.
- D. Knuth (Tex, pg. 9)
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistiguishable from a feature.
- R. Kulawiec
We don't have much time, so we don't teach them; we acquaint them
with things that they can learn.
- C. Leiserson (on "The Undergraduate Practicum" at MIT, from a talk
at CMU)
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the
complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
- C. Mingus
A good program is an elegant human readable implementation of a
well-defined algorithm.
JG
Developing large and complex systems does not have to be difficult,
just apply decomposition and abstraction.
JG
If you are never confused, then you will never learn. If your intellect
is not challenged, you will not understand or learn.
JG
Dakin (to Irwin, his teacher): Do you really believe that, sir, or are
you just trying to make us think?
- A. Bennet (in "The History Boys")