Programming Quotations

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On 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC the world will end.
~ 32-bit Unix

Given that even artifacts in the ancient Mayan calendar attract apocalyptic cults, surely Unix will generate them too. Unix is gradually switching to 64-bit timestamps which don’t have this Y2K38 problem.

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.
~ Red Adair (born: 1915-06-18 died: 2004-08-07 at age: 89)

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)

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: “Macintosh — We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.”
~ 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)

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it’s done.
~ Scott Adams (born: 1957-06-08 age: 52), creator of Dilbert.

Don’t worry about people stealing an idea; if it’s original, you’ll have to shove it down their throats.
~ Howard Aiken (born: 1900-03-08 died: 1973-03-14 at age: 73)

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate. (All hope abandon, ye who enter here.)
~ Dante Alighieri (born: 1265 died: 1321-09-14 at age: 56)

Nothing worthwhile ever goes smoothly.
~ Mike Amling

Apple likes me, but they strongly prefer my money.
~ Tom Anderson

One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create.
~ Michael Anissimov 1995

A picture is worth a thousand words but it takes 3,000 times the disk space.
~ anonymous

Any simple problem can be made worse if enough meetings are held to discuss it.
~ anonymous

GØD is REAL unless declared INTEGER.
~ Anonymous

In FØRTRAN, variables beginning I…N are implicitly INTEGER, the rest REAL.

If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.
~ Anonymous

Never let a computer know you’re in a hurry.
~ Anonymous

Sedulously eschew obfuscatory hyperverbosity and prolixity.
~ Anonymous

The Unix philosophy basically involves giving you just enough rope to hang yourself. And then a couple of feet more, just to be sure.
~ anonymous

Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.
~ Marcus Aurelius (born: 121-04-26 AD died: 180-03-17 AD at age: 58)

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
~ Charles Babbage (born: 1791-12-26 died: 1871-10-18 at age: 79)

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
~ Charles Babbage (born: 1791-12-26 died: 1871-10-18 at age: 79)

Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the “most reliable Windows ever.” To me, this is like saying that asparagus is “the most articulate vegetable ever.”
~ Dave Barry (born: 1947-07-03 age: 62)

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
~ Dr. Albert A. Bartlett (born: 1923-03-21 age: 86)

I don’t need to test my programs. I have an error-correcting modem.
~ Om I. Baud

How good the design is doesn’t matter near as much as whether the design is getting better or worse. If it is getting better, day by day, I can live with it forever. If it is getting worse, I will die.
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 49) , evangelist for extreme programming .

I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 49) , evangelist for extreme programming .

I tell people to start implementing when they are pretty sure there aren’t more important stories out there. An iteration’s worth of data is worth months of speculation.
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 49) , evangelist for extreme programming .

Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical.
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 49) , evangelist for extreme programming .

Responsible Development is the style of development I aspire to now. It can be summarized by answering the question, “How would I develop if it were my money?” I’m amazed how many theoretical arguments evaporate when faced with this question.
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 49) , evangelist for extreme programming .

Responsible Development shares many practices with XP but the roots are different. Responsible Development’s values are honesty, transparency, accountability, and responsibility. These lead me to pairing, test-first, incremental design, continuous integration, and so on because they support the values.
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 49) , evangelist for extreme programming .

Testing is not the point. The point is about responsibility.
~ Kent Beck (born: 1961 age: 49) , evangelist for extreme programming .

The human mind likes a strange idea as the body likes a strange protein, and resists it with a similar energy.
~ William Ian Beardmore Beveridge (born: 1908 died: 2006 at age: 98)

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (born: 1769-08-15 died: 1821-05-05 at age: 51)

If you think something is impossible, don’t disturb the person who is doing it!
~ Amar Bose (born: 1929-11-02 age: 80)

Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.
~ Amar Bose (born: 1929-11-02 age: 80)

He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes.
~ Randolph Bourne (born: 1886-05-30 died: 1918-12-22 at age: 32)

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft… and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. ~ Werner von Braun (born: 1912-03-23 died: 1977-06-16 at age: 65)

The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
~ Werner von Braun (born: 1912-03-23 died: 1977-06-16 at age: 65)

von Braun is the classic nerd who became a mass murderer by refusing to think about the V2 missiles he was developing as anything but interesting toys.

Everyone generalises from one example. At least, I do.
~ Steven Brust (born: 1955-11-23 age: 54)

All progress is based on a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

It is tact that is golden, not silence.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
~ Joseph Campbell (born: 1904-03-26 died: 1987-10-31 at age: 83)

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.
~ Tom Cargill

“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”.
~ Lewis Carroll (born: 1832-01-27 died: 1898-01-14 at age: 65) — Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 81)

An example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no meaning. It is neither true nor false.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:

1. It’s completely impossible.
2. It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing.
3. I said it was a good idea all along.

~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)

Three Laws Of Prediction

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.
2. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)

A program is only as good as its worst piece of code.
~ Joshua Cramer

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.
~ Seymour Cray (born: 1925-09-28 died: 1996-10-05 at age: 71)

I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS.
~ Larry DeLuca

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt ax. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

Beauty is our business.
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

Referring to computer science.

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)

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

Don’t blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for “the average programmer”, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.
~ 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 an 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)

I don’t need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself “Dijkstra would not have liked this”, well, that would be enough immortality for me.
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

If in physics there’s something you don’t understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn’t make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn’t work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn’t work, you’ve messed up.
~ 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 FØRTRAN, 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.

Programming in Basic causes brain damage.
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

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)

The main way to create simplicity is to decompose complexity into a set of black boxes that have minimal possible interaction with each other. Complexity is manageable, so long as it is tightly contained. In the Java idiom, the black boxes are classes with just a few public methods and the private methods hide the complexity inside the black box.

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.
~ 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)

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
~ 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)

Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred.
~ David Dixon 1998, winning entry of the Haiku Error Messages 21st Challenge by Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau, sponsored by Salon.com

I can predict the future by assuming that money and male hormones are the driving forces for new technology. Therefore, when virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
~ Dogbert

“Plants” with “leaves” no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous “bacteria” could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop — at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
~ Eric Drexler (born: 1955-04-25 age: 54) Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
~ Freeman Dyson (born: 1923-12-15 age: 86) The Day After Trinity

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
~ Thomas Alva Edison (born: 1847-02-11 died: 1931-10-18 at age: 84)

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)

The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
~ Thomas Stearns Eliot (born: 1888-09-26 died: 1965-01-04 at age: 76)

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)

“Goodbye World!”: the last program you write in C.
~ Bruce Feist 1993

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them!
~ Richard P. Feynman (born: 1918-05-11 died: 1988-02-15 at age: 69) 1998

Do more with less.
~ Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (born: 1895-07-12 died: 1983-07-01 at age: 87)

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.
~ Bill Gates (born: 1955-08-28 age: 54)

In nature, the analogous physical property that has this order of magnitude variability is electrical resistance.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
~ Bill Gates (born: 1955-08-28 age: 54)

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.
~ Carl Friedrich Gauss (born: 1777-04-30 died: 1855-02-23 at age: 77) , the most prolific mathematician of all time.

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.
~ Carl Friedrich Gauss (born: 1777-04-30 died: 1855-02-23 at age: 77) , the most prolific mathematician of all time.

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.
~ Carl Friedrich Gauss (born: 1777-04-30 died: 1855-02-23 at age: 77) , the most prolific mathematician of all time.

Mathematicians stand on each other’s shoulders.
~ Carl Friedrich Gauss (born: 1777-04-30 died: 1855-02-23 at age: 77) , the most prolific mathematician of all time.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
~ Carl Friedrich Gauss (born: 1777-04-30 died: 1855-02-23 at age: 77) , the most prolific mathematician of all time.

One of the principal objects of theoretical research in my department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity.
~ Josiah Willard Gibbs (born: 1839-02-11 died: 1903-04-28 at age: 64) , pioneer in the mathematics of thermodynamics.

No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.
~ Mark Gibbs

This is a an example of Murphy’s law.

The future has already happened, it just isn’t evenly distributed.
~ William Gibson (born: 1948-03-17 age: 62)

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.
~ William Gibson (born: 1948-03-17 age: 62) 2009-06-01

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man ever need make.
~ Irving John Good (born: 1916-12-09 died: 2009-04-05 at age: 92) 1965

All of us who attended the meeting — including Microsoft — unanimously agreed that unilaterally extending the Java programming language would hurt compatibility among Java tools and programs, would injure other tools vendors, and would damage customers’ ability to run a Java-based software product on whatever platform they wished.
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54) , co-inventor of Java.

People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security.
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54) , co-inventor of Java.

The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60) ,

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)

Any sufficiently complicated C or FØRTRAN program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
~ Philip Greenspun (born: 1963-09-28 age: 46) , Greenspun’s Tenth Rule

Stupidity is the only natural capital offense.
~ Robert A. Heinlein (born: 1907-07-07 died: 1988-05-08 at age: 80)

If it ain’t broke, open it up and see what makes it so bloody special.
~ The Bastard Operator From Hell

[About Algol 60] Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
~ C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare (born: 1934-01-11 age: 76) Hints on Programming Language Design 1973-12, Turing award winner 1980.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
~ C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare (born: 1934-01-11 age: 76) , Turing award winner 1980.

A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work by being declared to work.
~ Anatol Holt

Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare.
~ Blair Houghton

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo (born: 1802-02-26 died: 1885-05-22 at age: 83) , born 1852, Histoire d’un Crime

The devil is in the details.
~ English idiom

This idiom predates programming, but anticipates it.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.
~ Steve Jobs (born: 1955-02-24 age: 55) 1993

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
~ Steve Jobs (born: 1955-02-24 age: 55)

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them — not something they’d want now.
~ Steve Jobs (born: 1955-02-24 age: 55)

Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.
~ Steve Jobs (born: 1955-02-24 age: 55) 1994

A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author.
~ Stephen Curtis Johnson , winner of the first Turing award.

Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn’t we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn’t we proceed with great caution?
~ Bill Joy (born: 1954-11-08 age: 55) , co-inventor of Java in Why the future doesn’t need us

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.
~ Bill Joy (born: 1954-11-08 age: 55) , co-inventor of Java in Why the future doesn’t need us

The best way to do research is to make a radical assumption and then assume it’s true. For me, I use the assumption that object oriented programming is the way to go.
~ Bill Joy (born: 1954-11-08 age: 55) , co-inventor of Java.

The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way… However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That’s why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that’s out there.
~ Bill Joy (born: 1954-11-08 age: 55) , co-inventor of Java.

The standard definition of AI Artificial Intelligence is that which we don’t understand.
~ Bill Joy (born: 1954-11-08 age: 55) , co-inventor of Java.

There are a couple of people in the world who can really program in C or FØRTRAN. They write more code in less time than it takes for other programmers. Most programmers aren’t that good. The problem is that those few programmers who crank out code aren’t interested in maintaining it.
~ Bill Joy (born: 1954-11-08 age: 55) , co-inventor of Java.

You can drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror as long as nothing is ahead of you. Not enough software professionals are engaged in forward thinking.
~ Bill Joy (born: 1954-11-08 age: 55) , co-inventor of Java.

You can’t prove anything about a program written in C or FØRTRAN. It’s really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar.
~ Bill Joy (born: 1954-11-08 age: 55) , co-inventor of Java.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
~ Alan Kay (born: 1940-05-17 age: 69), inventor of the Logo programming language.

Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
~ Alan Kay (born: 1940-05-17 age: 69) , inventor of the Logo programming language.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
~ Alan Kay (born: 1940-05-17 age: 69) , inventor of the Logo programming language.

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
~ Alan Kay (born: 1940-05-17 age: 69) , inventor of the Logo programming language.

Don’t be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
~ John Keats (born: 1795-10-31 died: 1821-02-23 at age: 25)

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
~ John Keats (born: 1795-10-31 died: 1821-02-23 at age: 25)

Heavier-than-air flying machines are not possible.
~ Lord Kelvin (born: 1824-06-26 died: 1907-12-17 at age: 83) 1895

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
~ Brian Kernighan (born: 1942-01-01 age: 68)

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong especially if one is promptly found out.
~ John Maynard Keynes (born: 1883-06-05 died: 1946-04-21 at age: 62)

A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72)

Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72)

Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72) , Back of the index, The Art Of Computer Programming, Volume 1, Edition 1, 2nd printing.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72)

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one’s contributions to computer science.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72)

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72)

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72) ,

Unfortunately, some have misread this quotation as optimisation is in itself evil, or even that is it wicked to consider speed when choosing an algorithm.

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72)

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72)

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time; premature optimization is the root of all evil.
~ Donald Ervin Knuth (born: 1938-01-10 age: 72)

Quantum mechanics is mysterious, and consciousness is mysterious. Q.E.D. Quantum mechanics and consciousness must be related.
~ Christof Koch (born: 1956-11-13 age: 53)

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
~ Rich Kulawiec

parodying A. C. Clarke’s third law of prediction.

A successful person isn’t necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving.
~ Ray Kurzweil (born: 1948-02-12 age: 62)

By 2009, computers will disappear. Displays will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses.
~ Ray Kurzweil (born: 1948-02-12 age: 62)

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.
~ Ray Kurzweil (born: 1948-02-12 age: 62)

There is one brain organ that is optimised for understanding and articulating logical processes, and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick, and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it.
~ Ray Kurzweil (born: 1948-02-12 age: 62)

We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are “things” outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not.
~ Ray Kurzweil (born: 1948-02-12 age: 62)

Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.
~ Eagleson’s Law

However, it the author was me, that polite stranger left me notes on what I would need to know to quickly become familiar with the program, without overwhelming me with detail. It is an odd feeling, like meeting a twin. I don’t recall writing the words, but it sounds like something I would have said.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
~ Gall’s Law .

If we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe they workings completely, in mechanicanl terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would not canatin any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers!
~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (born: 1646-07-01 died: 1716-11-14 at age: 70)

The truth of this came home to me circa 1970 when I wrote OPTOW, a program to design high voltage transmission lines. It developed what could best be called a personality, higher order behaviours that I did not intend, and did not consciously program in. The personality emerged as a side effect of the thousands of detailed equations and constraints I had programmed in. I suspect the human brain is similar, except the evolution tests the mettle of the personality and punishes the underlying mechanisms.

In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.
~ Dr. John Lilly (born: 1915-01-06 died: 2001-09-30 at age: 86)

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

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.
~ Ada Lovelace (born: 1815-12-10 died: 1852-11-27 at age: 36) 1896

All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.
~ IBM maintenance manual (born: 1925 age: 85)

Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching.
~ Terje Mathisen

You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.
~ Jim McCarthy

Working on a team, leading a team and working alone are completely different experiences. Software teams are usually composed of asocial people, and egotists attracted by the absolute control that computer programming offers. Leading a team pays the best and I find it the most fun. Other people handle all the tedious details without any effort on my part. It is like wearing a power suit.

Computers of the future may way no more than 1.36 tonnes (1½ tons) .
~ Popular Mechanics (born: 1874-02-17 died: 1956-06-19 at age: 82) 1949

The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.
~ Robert Metcalfe (born: 1946-04-07 age: 63) , inventer of Ethernet

As Mr. Nagle so competently points out, almost no one uses Eiffel; in fact until recently there were only 9 users. But now a 10th person just started, so we are holding a conference, appropriately titled the TENTH EIFFEL USER conference, to celebrate.
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) 1992, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

Proving a language does not have to be popular to be influential.

Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to!
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) 1991, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

Careful as they may be, developers of Eiffel libraries will always run into cases in which, after releasing a library class, they suddenly experience what in French is called esprit de l’escalier or wit of the staircase: a great thought which unfortunately is an afterthought, like a clever reply that would have stunned all the other dinner guests — if only you had thought of it before walking down the stairs after the party is over.
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) 1989, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) 1992, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

Most of the things I don’t like about Java are when it apes C.

I have always felt sympathy towards the biologists who accept to debate creationists. Now I also understand them better; one can fight opinions, not articles of faith.
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) 1991, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) , creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

One should not write a class without a specification — a contract. The contract lists the internal consistency conditions that the class will maintain (the invariant) and, for each operation, the correctness conditions that are the responsibility of the client (the precondition) and those which the operation promises to establish in return (the postcondition).

Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI chip, bridge, engine…) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) , creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language. Description of Design By Contract

Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) 1989, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time.
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 60) 1989, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of ever being supplemented by new discoveries is exceedingly remote.
~ Albert Abraham Michelson (born: 1852-12-19 died: 1931-05-09 at age: 78) 1903

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it is works but what it does when it’s stuck.
~ Marvin Minsky (born: 1927-08-07 age: 82)

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas — of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
~ Marvin Minsky (born: 1927-08-07 age: 82)

It’s ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.
~ Marvin Minsky (born: 1927-08-07 age: 82)

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
~ Marvin Minsky (born: 1927-08-07 age: 82) 1995

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 a pianist sits down and does a virtuoso performance he is in a technical sense transmitting more information to a machine than any other human activity involving machinery allows.
~ Robert Moog (born: 1934-05-23 died: 2005-08-21 at age: 71) , inventor of the music synthesiser.

I see a strong parallel between the evolution of robot intelligence and the biological intelligence that preceded it. The largest nervous systems doubled in size about every fifteen million years since the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. Robot controllers double in complexity (processing power) every year or two. They are now barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, but should catch up with us within a half century.
~ Hans P. Moravec (born: 1948-11-30 age: 61)

Just remember: you’re not a “dummy,” no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who — though technically expert — couldn’t design hardware and software that“s usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it.
~ Walter Mossberg (born: 1947-03-27 age: 62)

There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the moon, because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the earth’s gravity.
~ Forest Ray Moulton (born: 1872-04-29 died: 1952-12-07 at age: 80) University of Chicago astronomer, 1932

When you encounter obstacles, you know what you are doing is important.
~ Gottfried Johannes Müller (born: 1914-04-10 died: 2009-09-26 at age: 95)

A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so. By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment when it is useful; and that this lapse of time can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number — there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

Science is about finding ever better approximations rather than pretending you have already found ultimate truth.

Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)

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: 1643-01-04 died: 1727-03-31 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.
~ Sir Isaac Newton (born: 1643-01-04 died: 1727-03-31 at age: 84)

If I have seen further than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.
~ Sir Isaac Newton (born: 1643-01-04 died: 1727-03-31 at age: 84)

Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero
~ Don Nichols

That’s the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
~ Larry Niven (born: 1938-03-30 age: 71)

A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the conditions that make it fail.
~ Jerry Ogdin

There’s no reason for individuals to have a computer in their home.
~ Ken Olson (born: 1926-02-20 age: 84) , founder of Digital Equipment Corporation 1977

Everything is more complicated than it first seems.
~ Tris Orendorff (born: 1961-02-13 age: 49)

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)

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)

A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
~ Alan J. Perlis (born: 1922-04-01 died: 1990-02-07 at age: 67) , winner of the first Turing award.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
~ Alan J. Perlis (born: 1922-04-01 died: 1990-02-07 at age: 67) , winner of the first Turing award.

Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
~ Jeff Pesis

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
~ Henry Petroski (born: 1942-02-06 age: 68)

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
~ Pablo Picasso (born: 1881-10-25 died: 1973-04-08 at age: 91)

After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.
~ John Pierce

My laptop has freed me to travel.
~ Steven Pinker (born: 1954-09-18 age: 55)

Never discourage anyone… who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.
~ Plato (born: 428 BC died: 348 BC at age: 80)

The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else.
~ Rufus Pollock (born: 1978 age: 32) in Talk.

Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write FØRTRAN programs in any language.
~ Ed Post Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal

Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
~ François Poulin

Imagine now and sing.
creating myths
forming jewels from the falling snow.
~ Ray Kurzweil’s Cybermatic Poet program (born: 1948-02-12 age: 62)

Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
~ Epigrams in Programming ACM SIGPLAN, 1982-09

Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue.
~ Linux prompt

A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible — and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
~ Eric S. Raymond (born: 1957-12-04 age: 52) The Cathedral and the Bazaar

There is no end to what can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.
~ Art Rennison

We’ll never win by being like them. Our best tactic is to be better. Better necessarily means different.
~ Jon Rentzsch (born: 1976 age: 34)

A language that doesn’t have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.
~ Dennis M. Ritchie (born: 1941-09-09 age: 68)

All great programmers are paranoid.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Ambiguity is the mother of confusion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

An architect first creates the blueprints to document and clarify his intentions for a building. Then he supervises the construction. Most programmers, oddly, try to do this the other way around. First they compose code, then they document their intentions at the last minute, if at all, with a few comments. Usually these comments describe what the program actually does, not why, or anything about what the program is for or is intended to do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

An example (complete and annotated) is worth 1000 lines of BNF.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Architects first draw up blueprints to document their intentions. Then they revise them as construction proceeds. Programmers imagine the way to construct programs is the reverse — draw the blueprints/comments after construction is finished, and only if there is spare time.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Burroughs mainframes had legendary brilliant operating system software. Their secret was to use tiny teams of the most brilliant people they could find.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

By analysing thin slices of a hippocampus (a part of the brain), scientists were able to create computer chip that mimics its functions. They don’t know how it works, but it does.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Computer programs are getting so huge, there is no time to read them any more. You have to be able to skim them or navigate them and safely ignore almost everything. Language design needs to focus on making this easier.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Don’t worry about documenting what the code does. Document your intention for each method. Also document the values you intend each variable to contain. The code already perfectly describes what your code does, however, it says nothing about your intentions or the big picture.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Doubling the size of a team will probably make it produce even more slowly. The problem is the more team members, the more secrets, the less each team member understands about how it all fits together and how his changes may adversely affect others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Electrical resistance is a hugely variable property, varying over many orders of magnitude, much like programming skill.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Every compilable program in a sense works. The problem is with your unrealistic expectations on what it will do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Everyone has good ideas. The skill is selling them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Humanity destroys everything it touches. Looked at from the point of view of other species, Homo sapiens make ebola look friendly. Why do humans imagine that hyper-intelligent AI will fail to notice that?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Humans are not particularly good at multi-tasking. Even leaving your email on to interrupt lowers your IQ by 14 points, according to Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar. The key to programming is removing from your mind everything that you don’t you need for the microtask at hand. One way to remove mental clutter is to write it down in an electronic todo list, so you can temporarily stop thinking about it. Another is to play music to drown out distracting sounds. Another is writing small modules and classes so you don’t need to juggle many facts to complete the code. Distraction then makes less trouble.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

I can’s see how anyone can estimate a computer project that is not just a theme and variations of one done before. Trivial problems unexpectedly turn into a regress of Yak Shaving .
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

I find my most productive and error-free programming is a result of going on a burn. It requires pizza, coffee, and at least 24 hours of uninterrupted solitude. To program confidently and rapidly, I must have, in immediate mind, the consequence of any change I may make to a computer system. It usually takes at least 10 hours to come up to full speed, except for trivial programs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

I licence my software for non-military use only . I know of no Christian who similarly restricts his work to peaceful purposes. I gather Christians don’t really believe in punishment after death, except for homosexuals.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

I would think the key to a weight loss program would be knowing exactly how hungry you have to be before you start eating and knowing exactly how full you can be before you stop eating. The plan would include learning how to determine those two points, and learning how to monitor when you cross them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

IBM has simulated a cat cerebral cortex at 1% speed using a supercomputer with 147,456 processors 144 terabytes (144,000 gig) of RAM. They have also simulated 1% of a human cerebral cortex. This gives scientists a tool to understand how thought works.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

If anything grows at 5% a year, in 70 years it grows 32-fold. So, for example, if your city council aims for 5% industrial/population growth a year, in one lifetime it would need 32 times as many sewage treatment plants as it has today.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62) see lecture by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett

If folklore claimed neutrinos existed, scientists still would not have found them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

If you don’t constantly refactor and improve your code as you maintain it, it will deteriorate.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

If you misplace your TV remote 10% of the time, buying a second remote will ensure you misplace them both only 1% of the time.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

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. Unfortunately, there is no glory for all but a handful of those who devote themselves to this most valuable exploration.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Imagine an architect who would never admit to making sketches, blueprints or erecting scaffolds. In his view, the finished building speaks for itself. How could a young architect learn from such a man? Mathematicians traditionally refuse ever to disclose the intuitions that lead them to a conjecture, or the empirical tests to see if it were likely true, or the initial proofs. They are like chefs who refuse to disclose their recipes, ingredients or techniques.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Imagine some drunk set up a Woodstock-sized sound system in his back yard, then one night screamed out “Kin ennybuddy hear me?” I think mankind will get a similar reaction to its babbling inane sitcoms and simulated rapes and murders on all radio frequencies to the cosmic neighbourhood.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

In his novel Capitol, Orson Scott Card describes a civilisation with a cult of celebrity. To prolong the lives of celebrities, they are put into suspended animation only to wake for one day in a century. During that day, every waking moment is holographically recorded.  Twitter  gives the illusion that you are such a celebrity and the world is desperate to know precisely what you ate for breakfast and how your bowels are functioning.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Is  Twitter  the primordial ooze from which a planetary consciousness will evolve?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

It is a wonder that anyone has any skill for computer programming since our genetic capabilities evolved in a computer-free environment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

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: 62)

It’s amazing how much structure natural languages have when you consider who speaks them and how they evolved.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

JSP is like a 400 year old house where each generation that lived in it tacked on an extra room. There is no overall plan, just a hodge-podge of architectural styles kludged together. The syntax is, to be kind, appalling.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Just as in nature, the more bugs you find the more there are yet to find.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Finding a bug is a sign you were asleep a the switch when coding. Stop debugging, and go back over your code line by line.

Mental paralysis from overwhelm is the #1 block to programmer productivity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Not only would I refuse to buy a car featuring Microsoft software, I would refuse to even ride in one, even if all they did was manage the sound system.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Once we devise robots capable of passing the Turing test, I think it safest to presume they are conscious, and at the least, that we take their requests seriously.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

One of the few nice things I can say about  Twitter  is that it teaches brevity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Only Apple has such marketing cachet that they can release a device who primary effect is to make the user go deaf, and have it hailed as the innovation of the century.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Outhouses and programs are typically constructed without plans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

People will do in cars and on the Internet that which they would never do face to face, only because in person can they be punched in the nose.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Programming methodologies are rules of thumb. To make them sound simultaneously simple, revolutionary and grand, the authors overstate their universal applicability.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Programs are even more importantly narratives about your intentions addressed to fellow programmers (including your later self) than they are commands to a computer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Progress in computing comes most easily by inventing new ways to squander once scarce resources.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Syntactic sugar makes programs terser and hence easier to understand and maintain. The blanket rejection of sugar is a manifestation of “real men make their own bits”.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

The biggest and most unpredictable delays in a project come when learning to use a new software tool.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

The bug you are asking help with is nearly always in the code you did not post.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

The cardinal rule of writing unmaintainable code is to specify each fact in as many places as possible and in as many ways as possible.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

The days of windows are numbered. I don’t mean the ugly OS. I mean panes of glass covering holes in buildings. They leak/waste too much energy, provide too easy access for criminals, are too vulnerable to extreme weather and make it too easy to spy on the occupants. Instead, they will be covered on the outside with solar panels and on the inside with large display panels (something like TVs). They might display the view outside, or they might display the view from a house on a desert island or, Fahreheit 451 style, soap operas.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

The longer it takes for a bug to surface, the harder it is to find in the code.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

The most obvious way to show consideration for our cosmic neighbours would be to stop broadcasting on frequencies that are not ours.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

The odd thing about CSV (Comma Separated Value) files is that they are 3 times simpler to write than to read.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

There are over 72 million active websites, many with multiple servers. Imagine the aggregate bill for the electricity, cooling and hardware. If you did something to improve the efficiency of them by even 1%, you would have hugely more than justified your existence in terms of reducing your energy and green house gas emission footprint.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

There are two ways another country could defeat the United States. One of them is to subtly corrupt all the major computer operating systems.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

To work out the doubling time of an annual percentage growth, divide it into 70 (100 ÷ ln(2)). e.g. 7% ⇒ 10 years to double. So, for example, when electric power consumption was growing at 7% a year, we had to come up with double the generating capacity every decade. Further, every decade consumed more power than in all previous history combined. These are the consequences of simple arithmetic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62) see lecture by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett

We like to think that exploration and scientific discovery are driven by curiosity, but they are funded by the desire to make a buck, or to find new ways to kill or exploit others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

When a newbie asks for help tracking a bug in a code snippet, the problem is usually is the code he did not post, hence the value of an SSCCE.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

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: 62)

When computers drive cars:

• Traffic lights would not be needed. Cars would interleave in what would look like an RCMP musical ride.
• Cars could be safely packed closer together bumper to bumper and side to side increasing the capacity of existing roads.
• Cars will get better mileage. Computers will avoid fuel-costly acceleration and braking.
• You won’t have a single bad driver or an accident tying up traffic.
• Fog will not be a hazard since cars will “see” with multiple sensors (e.g. radar, sonar, infrared, laser) including radio communication with other vehicles further ahead and digital broadcasts of road and weather hazards. All cars in the vicinity will know what the other vehicles are planning to do.
• You can drive drunk, while having sex, while sleeping, while watching TV… in complete safety.
• Cars will simply not enter freeways if that would cause gridlock.
• No matter how inattentive you are, you won’t miss a freeway exit.
• You tell you car your destination, and it gets you there, adjusting the route to road conditions as it proceeds.
• You will normally exit your car, and leave your vehicle to find a parking space for itself, perhaps quite far away, in a very dense parking garage that few humans could navigate. When you want to leave, you summon your car electronically to pick you up at a convenient loading zone.
• You can send your car on errands without a driver, even transporting children and pets unattended.
• You can lend or rent out your car to others when you are not using it, and have it come get you wherever you are.
• You may share a pool of vehicles of various sizes and specialities. You summon a vehicle of the desired type with a digital cell phone call.
• Your taxi won’t have a driver. The distinction between a taxi, a rental vehicle and a vehicle pool will be blurred.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

When tackling a difficult programming task, do the easy work first. It is not lazy, since you will do all the work eventually. Each piece you complete removes some of the complexity, leaving the remainder simpler to tackle. Each piece you complete quietens your mind from fussing over some of the details of the solution. Each component you complete gives you an improved tool to think about the big picture with. As you churn away at the easy stuff, your subconscious has time to chew on the difficult parts. The biggest block to productivity is trying to solve the whole problem all at once. You go tharn like a deer in the headlights incapable of action.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

When you are programming and you feel paralysis from overwhelm:

• Write down your worries in an electronic todo list, so you can temporarily stop thinking about them.
• Write smaller modules and classes so you don’t need to juggle many facts to complete the code.
• Do some necessary, but simple, clerical task.
• Solve some simple problem with at least some probability of being useful in the big solution. It will break the logjam.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

When you can’t find a bug, you are probably looking in the wrong place. When you can’t find your glasses, you don’t keep scanning the same spot because you are convinced that is where you left them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

When you encounter a website without tacky ads for casinos and phony weight loss cures, you can thank the website owners who decided to forgo thousands of dollars in advertising revenue.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

When you were a child, if you did your own experiment to see if it was better to put to cocoa into your cup first or the hot milk first, then you likely have the programmer gene.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Write the comments first!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
~ Theodore Roosevelt (born: 1858-10-27 died: 1919-01-06 at age: 60)

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
~ Theodore Roosevelt (born: 1858-10-27 died: 1919-01-06 at age: 60)

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
~ Peter Rothman 1998

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.
~ Bertrand Russell (born: 1872-05-18 died: 1970-02-02 at age: 97)

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)

Hell is other people.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre (born: 1905-06-21 died: 1980-04-15 at age: 74) Huis Clos , (No Exit) 1934

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)

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer (born: 1788-02-22 died: 1860-09-21 at age: 72) 1896

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured the brain was a telegraph switchboard. (“What else could be?”) I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibnitz compared it to a mill, and I am told that some of the ancient Greeks though the brain functions like a catupult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
~ John R. Searle (born: 1932-07-31 age: 77)

A hacker on a roll may be able to produce — in a period of a few months — something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more.
~ Peter Seebach (born: 1972 age: 38)

Imprinting on your first system makes change a very hard thing.
~ Peter Seebach (born: 1972 age: 38) The cranky user: Baby duck syndrome

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that
~ Margaret Segall 1998

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)

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~ 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: 83)

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: 83) , The Wayward Gate: Science and the Supernatural

Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident. (Pygmies placed on the shoulders of giants see more than the giants themselves.)
~ Didacus Stella (born: 1524 died: 1578 at age: 54) , inspiring Newton’s famous quote.

Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.
~ Clifford Stoll (born: 1950 age: 60) author of The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.
~ Randall E. Stross

In nature, the analogous physical property that has this order of magnitude variability is electrical resistance.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup (born: 1950-12-30 age: 59)

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup (born: 1950-12-30 age: 59)

I’ve finally learned what “upward compatible” means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.
~ Dennie van Tassel

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success.
~ Nikola Tesla (born: 1856-07-10 died: 1943-01-07 at age: 86) 1896

We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time, and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly…
~ New York Times (born: 1851 age: 159) 1903-12-10

As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500 programs; a process that traditionally requires some debugging.
~ USA Today referring to the Internal Revenue Service conversion to a new computer system.

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.
~ Linus Benedict Torvalds (born: 1969-12-28 age: 40), creator of Linux

Software is like sex: It’s better when it’s free.
~ Linus Benedict Torvalds (born: 1969-12-28 age: 40), creator of Linux

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as “users”.
~ Edward Tufte (born: 1942 age: 68)

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
~ Alan Turing (born: 1912-06-23 died: 1954-06-07 at age: 41)

In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts,“And the sun stood still… and hasted not to go down about a whole day” Joshua 10:13 and “He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time” Psalms 104:5 were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.
~ Alan Turing (born: 1912-06-23 died: 1954-06-07 at age: 41)

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
~ Alan Turing (born: 1912-06-23 died: 1954-06-07 at age: 41)

Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.
~ Alan Turing (born: 1912-06-23 died: 1954-06-07 at age: 41)

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
~ Alan Turing (born: 1912-06-23 died: 1954-06-07 at age: 41)

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 rid of as any other vice.
~ 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) Whether Mark Twain actually said this is debatable.

I advocate that super programmers who can juggle vastly more complex balls than average guys can, should be banned, by management, from dragging the average crowd into system complexity zones where the whole team will start to drown.
~ Jan V.

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
~ Thomas John Watson (born: 1874-02-17 died: 1956-06-19 at age: 82) , chairman of IBM 1943

Scientific advances are enabled by a technology advance that allows us to see what we have not been able to see before.
~ Lloyd Watts (born: 1961-10-02 age: 48)

If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
~ Gerald Weinberg (born: 1933 age: 77) Weinberg’s Second Law

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
~ Joseph Weizenbaum (born: 1923-01-08 died: 2008-03-05 at age: 85)

Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection, but that usually will create another problem.
~ David John Wheeler (born: 1927-02-09 died: 2004-12-13 at age: 77)

Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
~ Alfred North Whitehead (born: 1861-02-15 died: 1947-12-30 at age: 86)

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
~ Maurice Wilkes (born: 1913-06-13 age: 96) Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging 1949

But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensible luxury, but a simple necessity.
~ Niklaus Wirth (born: 1934-02-15 age: 76)

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.
~ Niklaus Wirth (born: 1934-02-15 age: 76)

Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming.
~ Niklaus Wirth (born: 1934-02-15 age: 76)

Usually its users discover sooner or later that their program does not deliver all the desired results, or worse, that the results requested were not the ones really needed.
~ Niklaus Wirth (born: 1934-02-15 age: 76)

Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way (“Nick-louse Veert”), Americans invariably mangle it into “Nickel’s Worth”. This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value.
~ Niklaus Wirth (born: 1934-02-15 age: 76)

This is play on words about the various ways languages can pass parameters, by name, by reference and by value. Java supports only pass by value.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein (born: 1889-04-26 died: 1951-04-29 at age: 62)

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
~ Virginia Woolf (born: 1882-01-25 died: 1941-03-28 at age: 59)

Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.
~ Steve Wozniak (born: 1950-08-11 age: 59)

No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris.
~ Orville Wright (born: 1871-08-19 died: 1948-10-30 at age: 77) 1908

We see that same conservative pessimism in those crafting today’s computers and computer tools. They are overwhelmed by the details of producing even today’s solutions. You need young, over-confident people who don’t know too much to chart the course ahead. This is especially true of global warming where the current generation has largely given up hope of a green planet and sustainable human survival.

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason — including blind stupidity.
~ W. A. Wulf (born: 1939-12-08 age: 70)

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
~ Frank Zappa (born: 1940-12-21 died: 1993-12-04 at age: 52)

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