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
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. -- Galileo Galilei
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
So - what are the most important problems in software engineering? I’d answer “dealing with complexity”. -- Mark Chu-Carroll
[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).
Some people suggest that machines would be friendlier if input could be in a natural language. But natural language is probably the worst kind of input because it can be quite ambiguous. The process of retrieving information from the computer would be so time-consuming that you would be better off spending that time getting the information directly from an expert. -- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).
The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. ~Vidal Sassoon
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. –John Lennon
I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong. –Benjamin Franklin
Knowledge is being aware of what you can do. Wisdom is knowing when not to do it. ~Anonymous