[How friendly will this machine be?] Well, I don’t think it’s a matter
of friendliness, because ultimately if the program is going to
accomplish anything of value, it will probably be relatively complex.
-- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).
When you’ve got the code all ripped apart, it’s like a car that’s all
disassembled. You’ve got all the parts tying all over your garage and
you have to replace the broken part or the car will never run. It’s not
fun until the code gets back to the baseline again.
-- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).
We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most
important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many
separate causes of failure.
-- Jared Diamond
While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern
about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and
painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the
majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but
isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the
software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software
to the end user.
-- [A comment on a blog]
We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget
about what the symbols stand for. ...[The mathematician] need not be
idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these
symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for.
-- Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking
[How friendly will this machine be?] Well, I don’t think it’s a matter
of friendliness, because ultimately if the program is going to
accomplish anything of value, it will probably be relatively complex.
-- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).
When you’ve got the code all ripped apart, it’s like a car that’s all
disassembled. You’ve got all the parts tying all over your garage and
you have to replace the broken part or the car will never run. It’s not
fun until the code gets back to the baseline again.
-- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
-- John Lennon
Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute.
-- Alan J. Perlis
We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most
important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many
separate causes of failure.
-- Jared Diamond
The most damaging phrase in the language is, It's always been done that
way.
-- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper
While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern
about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and
painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the
majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but
isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the
software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software
to the end user.
-- [A comment on a blog]
Lisp is a programmable programming language.
-- John Foderaro
A witty saying proves nothing
-- Voltaire
Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.
-- George Burns
We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget
about what the symbols stand for. ...[The mathematician] need not be
idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these
symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for.
-- Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring
aircraft building progress by weight.
-- Bill Gates