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RE: Bye Steem!
What Paul does, and does very well, is to take ideas and concepts that
are beautiful in the abstract, and brings them down to a real world
level. That's a rare talent to find in writing these days.
-- Jeff "hemos" Bates, Director, OSDN; Co-evolver, Slashdot
PI seconds is a nanocentury.
-- [fact]
The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak.
-- J. B. Bossuet, Politics from Holy Writ, 1709
Functional programming is to algorithms as the ubiquitous little black
dress is to women's fashion.
-- Mark Tarver (of "The bipolar Lisp programmer" fame)
We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot
folks come out with WipeMe 1.0.
-- Andy Pierson
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only
off by a bit.
-- Anonymous
An interpreter raises the machine to the level of the user program; a
compiler lowers the user program to the level of the machine language.
-- SICP
It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally
vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Any sufficiently advanced technology is undistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
-- Cited by Randy Pausch
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
-- Thomas Edison
Revolutions come from standing on the shoulders of giants and facing in
a better direction.
-- Alan Kay
Philosophy: the finding of bad reasons for what one believes by
instinct.
-- Brave New World (paraphrased)
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir
de la faire plus courte. (I have made this letter so long only because I
did not have the leisure to make it shorter.)
-- Blaise Pascal (Lettres Provinciales)
It is better to be quiet and thought a fool than to open your mouth and
remove all doubt.
-- WikiHow
It’s hard to grasp abstractions if you don’t understand what they’re
abstracting away from.
-- Nathan Weizenbaum
The proof is by reductio ad absurdum, and reductio ad absurdum, which
Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is
a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the
sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the
game.
-- G. H. Hardy
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy
to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
-- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programmi ng)
Never do the impossible. People will expect you to do it forever after.
-- pigsandfishes.com
I think that a lot of programmers are ignoring an important point when
people talk about reducing code repetition on large projects.
Part of the idea is that large projects are intrinsically wrong. That
you should be looking at making a number of smaller projects that are
composable, even if you never end up reusing one of those smaller
projects elsewhere.
-- Dan Nugent
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be
regarded as a criminal offense.
-- E.W. Dijkstra
Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
-- Earl of Chesterfield
Fools! Don't they know that tears are a woman's most effective weapon?
-- Catwoman (The Batman TV Series, episode 83)
Students should be evaluated on how well they can achieve the goals they
strived to achieve within a realistic context. Students need to learn to
do things, not know things.
-- Roger Schank, Engines for Education
The problem is that small examples fail to convince, and large examples
are too big to follow.
-- Steve Yegge.
That is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the
real world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact,
the whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to
encourage kids. It is not found in nature.
-- Paul Graham
All great things require great dedication.
-- Chuck Norris(?)
A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is
obscure.
-- Hugh Kingsmill
You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can
handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then
handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more
ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.
-- Pablo Picasso
Understanding why C++ is the way it is helps a programmer use it well. A deep
understanding of a tool is essential for an expert craftsman.
-- Bjarne Stroustrap
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students
that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they
are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
-- E. W. Dijkstra
Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are
rare, much rarer than you think...
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan".