R
Roedy Green
I am collecting pithy programming quotations to display at random on
the footers of the Java glossary. Do you have any favourites that
should be included? Feel free to submit ones you composed yourself
you think would be useful/inspiring to fledgling programmers. Here's
your chance at immortality.
Here is what I have so far:
“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to
turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a
typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a
television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.”
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49)
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing
that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to
get at or repair.”
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49)
“Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of
one’s native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent
programmer.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity
— in short: what mathematicians call elegance — are not a dispensable
luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and
failure?”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they
should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the
bugs to start with.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“In the good old days physicists repeated each other’s experiments,
just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share
each other's programs, bugs included.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for,
but to give what society needs.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they
are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
In particular, he is talking about Bill Gates.
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it
and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity
sells better.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as
the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people:
sometimes they follow it!”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“Write a paper promising salvation, make it a structured something or
a virtual something, or abstract, distributed or higher-order or
applicative and you can almost be certain of having started a new
cult.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.”
~ George Eliot (born: 1819-11-22 died: 1880-12-22 at age: 61) (Mary
Ann Evans)
“A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing
before.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path
and leave a trail.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an
experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Don’t worry about where you are. Watch the first derivative.”
translation:
“Don’t worry about how things are. Watch where they are headed.”
~ Fred Green (born: 1913-07-12 died: 1992-04-10 at age: 78) (my Dad,
an electrical engineer)
“I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more
surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that
the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
can suppose.”
~ J.B.S. Haldane (born: 1892-11-05 died: 1964-12-01 at age: 72)
“If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then
the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”
~ Weinberg’s Second Law (born: 1933 age: 76)
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any
other reason but because they are not already common.”
~ John Locke (born: 1632-08-29 died: 1704-10-28 at age: 72) 1795-04-20
“To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them is
not to show their darkness but to put out our own eye.”
~ John Locke (born: 1632-08-29 died: 1704-10-28 at age: 72) 1795-04-20
“Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching.”
~ Terje Mathisen
“Whenever a new discovery is reported to the world, they say first,
‘It is probably not true,’ Then after, when the truth of the new
proposition has been demonstrated beyond question, they say, ‘Yes, it
may be true, but it is not important.’ Finally, when sufficient time
has elapsed to fully evidence its importance, they say, ‘Yes, surely
it is important, but it is no longer new.’”
~ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (born: 1533 died: 1592 at age: 59)
“When you encounter obstacles, you know what you are doing is
important.”
~ Gottfried Johannes Müller (born: 1914-04-10 age: 95)
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting
myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell
than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me.”
~ Sir Isaac Newton (born: 1642-12-25 died: 1727-03-20 at age: 84)
“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now
and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
~ Isaac Newton (born: 1643-01-04 died: 1727-03-31 at age: 84)
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one
that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
“Never discourage anyone… who continually makes progress, no matter
how slow.”
~ Plato (born: 428 BC died: 348 BC at age: 80)
“Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue.”
~ Linux prompt
“There is no end to what can be accomplished if you don’t care who
gets the credit.”
~ Art Rennison
“If you don’t constantly refactor and improve your code as you
maintain it, it will deteriorate.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“If you want to serve your species, you must be willing to fail.
People who want personal glory pursue safe mainstream success. But the
most valuable discoveries are off the beaten track, and most of that
prospecting will not pan out. There is no glory for all by a handful
of those who devote themselves to this most valuable exploration.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“It is too obvious to mention, but… If there are several different
ways of doing something, one of them is probably noticeably better. If
you do something more than once a day, it is probably worth a little
experiment and a few moments contemplating the advantages and
disadvantages of doing it each way. Then you can put your choice on
automatic.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“Only Apple has such marketing cachet that they can release a device
who primary effect is to make the user go deaf, and it is hailed as
the innovation of the century.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“When a rat philosopher heads down a tunnel and finds no cheese, he
does not say to himself ‘Rats! I failed’. He says, ‘I have learned
something. I now know one more place where the cheese isn’t.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer (born: 1788-02-22 died: 1860-09-21 at age: 72)
“All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy
and misconduct.”
~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it.”
~ Upton Sinclair (born: 1878-09-20 died: 1968-11-25 at age: 90)
“Every invention creates new needs, but the biggest needs are not for
new and more advanced versions of the last invention but for solutions
to the social problems the last invention created.”
~ Philip Slater (born: 1927 age: 82)
“Motors make noise, and that tells you about the feelings and
attitudes that went into it. Something was more important than sensory
pleasure — nobody would invent a chair or dish that smelled bad or
that made horrible noises — why were motors invented noisy? How could
they possibly be considered complete or successful inventions with
this glaring defect? Unless, of course, the aggressive, hostile,
assaultive sound actually served to express some impulse of the
owner.”
~ Philip Slater (born: 1927 age: 82), The Wayward Gate: Science and
the Supernatural
“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief
sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and
the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity
creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean
utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They
weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are
wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit,
once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get.”
~ Mark Twain (born: 1835-11-30 died: 1910-04-21 at age: 74)
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who
are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
~ Mark Twain (born: 1835-11-30 died: 1910-04-21 at age: 74)
“Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”
~ Virginia Woolf (born: 1882-01-25 died: 1941-03-28 at age: 59)
“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
~ Frank Zappa (born: 1940-12-21 died: 1993-12-04 at age: 52)
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
"We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes
they follow it!"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72
the footers of the Java glossary. Do you have any favourites that
should be included? Feel free to submit ones you composed yourself
you think would be useful/inspiring to fledgling programmers. Here's
your chance at immortality.
Here is what I have so far:
“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to
turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a
typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a
television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.”
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49)
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing
that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to
get at or repair.”
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49)
“Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of
one’s native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent
programmer.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity
— in short: what mathematicians call elegance — are not a dispensable
luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and
failure?”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they
should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the
bugs to start with.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“In the good old days physicists repeated each other’s experiments,
just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share
each other's programs, bugs included.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for,
but to give what society needs.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they
are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
In particular, he is talking about Bill Gates.
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it
and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity
sells better.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as
the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people:
sometimes they follow it!”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“Write a paper promising salvation, make it a structured something or
a virtual something, or abstract, distributed or higher-order or
applicative and you can almost be certain of having started a new
cult.”
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)
“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.”
~ George Eliot (born: 1819-11-22 died: 1880-12-22 at age: 61) (Mary
Ann Evans)
“A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing
before.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path
and leave a trail.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an
experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (born: 1803-05-25 died: 1882-04-27 at age: 78)
“Don’t worry about where you are. Watch the first derivative.”
translation:
“Don’t worry about how things are. Watch where they are headed.”
~ Fred Green (born: 1913-07-12 died: 1992-04-10 at age: 78) (my Dad,
an electrical engineer)
“I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more
surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that
the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
can suppose.”
~ J.B.S. Haldane (born: 1892-11-05 died: 1964-12-01 at age: 72)
“If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then
the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”
~ Weinberg’s Second Law (born: 1933 age: 76)
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any
other reason but because they are not already common.”
~ John Locke (born: 1632-08-29 died: 1704-10-28 at age: 72) 1795-04-20
“To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them is
not to show their darkness but to put out our own eye.”
~ John Locke (born: 1632-08-29 died: 1704-10-28 at age: 72) 1795-04-20
“Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching.”
~ Terje Mathisen
“Whenever a new discovery is reported to the world, they say first,
‘It is probably not true,’ Then after, when the truth of the new
proposition has been demonstrated beyond question, they say, ‘Yes, it
may be true, but it is not important.’ Finally, when sufficient time
has elapsed to fully evidence its importance, they say, ‘Yes, surely
it is important, but it is no longer new.’”
~ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (born: 1533 died: 1592 at age: 59)
“When you encounter obstacles, you know what you are doing is
important.”
~ Gottfried Johannes Müller (born: 1914-04-10 age: 95)
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting
myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell
than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me.”
~ Sir Isaac Newton (born: 1642-12-25 died: 1727-03-20 at age: 84)
“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now
and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
~ Isaac Newton (born: 1643-01-04 died: 1727-03-31 at age: 84)
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one
that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)
“Never discourage anyone… who continually makes progress, no matter
how slow.”
~ Plato (born: 428 BC died: 348 BC at age: 80)
“Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue.”
~ Linux prompt
“There is no end to what can be accomplished if you don’t care who
gets the credit.”
~ Art Rennison
“If you don’t constantly refactor and improve your code as you
maintain it, it will deteriorate.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“If you want to serve your species, you must be willing to fail.
People who want personal glory pursue safe mainstream success. But the
most valuable discoveries are off the beaten track, and most of that
prospecting will not pan out. There is no glory for all by a handful
of those who devote themselves to this most valuable exploration.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“It is too obvious to mention, but… If there are several different
ways of doing something, one of them is probably noticeably better. If
you do something more than once a day, it is probably worth a little
experiment and a few moments contemplating the advantages and
disadvantages of doing it each way. Then you can put your choice on
automatic.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“Only Apple has such marketing cachet that they can release a device
who primary effect is to make the user go deaf, and it is hailed as
the innovation of the century.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“When a rat philosopher heads down a tunnel and finds no cheese, he
does not say to himself ‘Rats! I failed’. He says, ‘I have learned
something. I now know one more place where the cheese isn’t.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer (born: 1788-02-22 died: 1860-09-21 at age: 72)
“All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy
and misconduct.”
~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it.”
~ Upton Sinclair (born: 1878-09-20 died: 1968-11-25 at age: 90)
“Every invention creates new needs, but the biggest needs are not for
new and more advanced versions of the last invention but for solutions
to the social problems the last invention created.”
~ Philip Slater (born: 1927 age: 82)
“Motors make noise, and that tells you about the feelings and
attitudes that went into it. Something was more important than sensory
pleasure — nobody would invent a chair or dish that smelled bad or
that made horrible noises — why were motors invented noisy? How could
they possibly be considered complete or successful inventions with
this glaring defect? Unless, of course, the aggressive, hostile,
assaultive sound actually served to express some impulse of the
owner.”
~ Philip Slater (born: 1927 age: 82), The Wayward Gate: Science and
the Supernatural
“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief
sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and
the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity
creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean
utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They
weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are
wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit,
once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get.”
~ Mark Twain (born: 1835-11-30 died: 1910-04-21 at age: 74)
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who
are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
~ Mark Twain (born: 1835-11-30 died: 1910-04-21 at age: 74)
“Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”
~ Virginia Woolf (born: 1882-01-25 died: 1941-03-28 at age: 59)
“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
~ Frank Zappa (born: 1940-12-21 died: 1993-12-04 at age: 52)
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
"We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes
they follow it!"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72