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 Dijkstra
Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams. -- Mary Ellen Kelly
[Innovation] comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. -- Steve Jobs
I think the root of your mistake is saying that macros don't scale to larger groups. The real truth is that macros don't scale to stupider groups. -- Paul Graham, on the Lightweight Languages mailing list.
Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Knuth
There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. –Aristotle
If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. –Vincent Van Gogh
I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. –Florence Nightingale
Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life. ~Dr. APJ Kalam