Best 93 quotes in «computer science quotes» category

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.

Ultimately, I try to think of my application’s main codebase as just stringing together various components and code from many sources. It just controls logic and flow. The real nitty-gritty is handled behind the scenes. This is why frameworks like Backbone are so important — they hide a lot of the details in the background and allow you to just focus on the flow and control of your application.

Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that "computer science" is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology—the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "what is". Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "how to".

We can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

Want to guarantee nasty conflicts? Take a word with multiple, fuzzy, definitions, force people to strike an agreement on it, attach large amounts of money to it, and then watch them fight about it a year or two later.

why bother with null and java 8 has optional

We will start by sketching the recursive algorithm and then add details to get to a full description of the algorithm. Footnote : Translation: We will add details till the mess becomes both undecipherable and incomprehensible at the same time. Hopefully, the inner poetical and rhythmical beauty of the text will keep the reader going.

What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.

What's in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.

When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed.

When the ANSI C standard was under development, the pragma directive was introduced. Borrowed from Ada, #pragma is used to convey hints to the compiler, such as the desire to expand a particular function in-line or suppress range checks. Not previously seen in C, pragma met with some initial resistance from a gcc implementor, who took the “implementation-defined” effect very literally—in gcc version 1.34, the use of pragma causes the compiler to stop compiling and launch a computer game instead! The gcc manual contained the following: The “#pragma” command is specified in the ANSI standard to have an arbitrary implementation-defined effect. In the GNU C preprocessor, “#pragma” first attempts to run the game “rogue”; if that fails, it tries to run the game “hack”; if that fails, it tries to run GNU Emacs displaying the Tower of Hanoi; if that fails, it reports a fatal error. In any case, preprocessing does not continue. —Manual for version 1.34 of the GNU C compiler

Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes. Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange. Some, downright weird. But then again, you’d have to be. To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.

Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

Worse yet is the rejection of upfront requirements. The basic observation is correct: requirements will change, and are hard anyway to capture at the beginning. In no way, however, does it imply the dramatic conclusion that upfront requirements are useless! What it does imply is that requirements should be subject to change, like all other artifacts on the software process. [...] The agile advice here is irresponsible and serious software projects should ignore it.The sound practice is to start collecting requirements at the beginning, produce a provisional version prior to engaging in design, and treat the requirements as a living product that undergoes constant adaptation throughout the project.

You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

A code, which according to Turing's schema is supposed to make one machine behave as if it were another specific machine (which is supposed to make the former imitate the latter) must do the following things. It must contain, in terms that the machine will understand (and purposively obey), instructions (further detailed parts of the code) that will cause the machine to examine every order it gets and determine whether this order has the structure appropriate to an order of the second machine. It must then contain, in terms of the order system of the first machine, sufficient orders to make the machine cause the actions to be taken that the second machine would have taken under the influence of the order in question.

I'm basically a computer science nerd.

Most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

Most papers in computer science describe how their author learned what someone else already knew.

Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.

Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science.

A few years ago a friend said that I use to hunt and fish and build houses and things but now my whole life revolved around my computer I replied "But my computer revolves around the world

AI can be programed to imitate human behavior only, but it can't be programmed to feel the emotions that make the humans behave the way they do.

A good standalone plugin can also make you a fair amount of money. Many developers make a decent living by simply maintaining and updating one or two crucial plugins that are far better than anything available for free.

AI research can have irreversible repercussions in the life of the human species, so we must tread cautiously.

All existing machines and memories use "direct addressing," which is to say that every word in the memory has a numerical address of its own that characterizes it and its position within the memory (the total aggregate of all hierarchic levels) uniquely.

Artificial intelligence is nowhere near attaining actual sentience or awareness. And without awareness it’s simply a mechanical device, which may pretend to show emotions and sentience, if it is programmed to do so, and thus it may be able to fool the humans as being alive, but in its own internal circuitry, it’d simply be following its preprogrammed tasks through the flowchart of an algorithm.

And they came to be included in a culture and community that placed the computer science engineer at the highest level of social status.

Any artificial automaton that has been constructed for human use, and specifically for the control of complicated processes, normally possesses a purely logical part and an arithmetical part, i.e. a part in which arithmetical processes play no role, and one in which they are of importance.

...artificial intelligence will become a major human rights issue in the twenty-first century.

An activity originally intended to be performed by low-status, clerical – and more often than not, female – computer programming was gradually and deliberately transformed into a high-status, scientific, and masculine discipline.

An international power supply is the device which means it doesn't matter what country you're in, or even if you know what country you're in (more of a problem than you might suspect) - you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least, Microsoft calls it that because it hasn't got it yet. In the Mac world we've had it for so long we didn't even think of giving it a name.

Computers and mobile devices are becoming known for their inherent insecurities and the ability to damage the long term health of the users.

Computation is not the same as thought and emulation is not the same as imagination.

A system of logical instructions that an automaton can carry out and which causes the automaton to perform some organized task is called a code.

Automation vs. human labor is a false dichotomy

believe the power of jQuery is highly underutilized. Most developers will take advantage of its shortcuts and CSS selectors, but most of the time they fail to take advantage of much else. Being able to extend jQuery, whether by adding your own functions, CSS selectors or full-blown plugins, makes you a much stronger and smarter developer.

Bombe atomique hier, bombe informatique aujourd'hui et, demain, bombe génétique?

Computer science increasingly relies on its private corporate patrons who apply their own closed systems of peer review and criticism, with occasional results thrown over the wall. The closed walls of Redmond or Mountain View enable old-fashioned patronage of nature's secrets. The objectivity and scientific status of computer science is a chimera: we cannot stand on the shoulders of giants in computer science, for they simply refuse to let us.

El desarrollo de software comparte con el deporte profesional la característica de lograr que los treintañeros se sientan decrépitos

El hecho es que el ordenador está aquí para quedarse y los niños saben utilizarlo y nosotros no. Incluso el lenguaje.

Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers.

Generating a system architecture is not a deterministic process. It requires careful consideration of business requirements, technology choices, existing infrastructure and systems, and actual physical resources, such as budget and manpower.

In my experience, requirements change quite often, or new situations will arise that weren’t anticipated at the start of the project. If the situation can be addressed with a plugin, I just whip open the standalone plugin page, make the updates and pop the new plugin back in. Because the plugin is self-contained, it’s easy to recreate the problem, fix it, and get it back into the codebase.

Ich langte in meine Tasche nach einem Milky Way - was sonst für einen Astronomen - und machte es mir bequem, um den Hacker auf meinem grünen Monitor zu beobachten.

...if you aren't, at any given time, scandalized by code you wrote five or even three years ago, you're not learning anywhere near enough