#computer quotes

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

When in doubt, use brute force.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.

Humans are the best value in computers -- where else can you get a non-linear computer weighing only about 160lbs, having a billion binary decision elements, that can be mass-produced by unskilled labour?

The psychological profile [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large. When you're writing a program, you're saying, "Add one to the counter," but you know why you're adding one to the counter. You can step back and see a picture of the way a process is moving. Computer scientists see things simultaneously at the low level and the high level.

The good news is: Anything is possible on your computer. The bad news is: Nothing is easy.

How I hated UNIX back in the seventies - that devilish accumulator of data trash, obscurer of function, enemy of the user! If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive UNIX would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because it's name was changed to LINUX and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

The best computer game i ever played is life, hope i get to level 100.