Computer Science Quotes

“A digital computer is essentially a huge army of clerks, equipped with rule books, pencil and paper, all stupid and entirely without initiative, but able to follow millions of precisely defined operations. The difficulty lies in handing over the rule book.”
― Christopher W. Alexander

“Stop pushing people into web development as if it is the only true career path. Instead, push people into computer science, programming, coding, etc. There is so much competition because everyone is doing it, you just create a lot of demoralized and disgruntled people. There is more to programming than web development.”
― Olawale Daniel

“Loving what you do, doing what you love”
― Randall Hyde, Write Great Code, Volume 3: Engineering Software

“I used to do machine language programming in the lights on the front panel of a computer; now I do higher-dimensional type theory. It's a little bit crazy.”
― Robert Harper

“Often people think of developments in computation as arising when we make our computers more blazingly fast, so they can compute more stuff, bigger data. It's actually just as important to prune away big parts of the data that aren't relevant to the problem at hand! The fastest computation is the one you don't do.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and EverythingElse

“People who discover the power and beauty of high-level, abstract ideas often make the mistake of believing that concrete ideas at lower levels are worthless and might as well be forgotten. On the contrary, the best computer scientists are thoroughly grounded in basic concepts of how computers actually work. The essence of computer science is an ability to understand many levels of abstraction simultaneously.”
― Donald Knuth

“But I love the teaching: the hard work of a first class, the fun of the second class. Then the misery of the third.”
― Ken Thompson

“It's easy to mistake familiarity with computers for intelligence, but computer literate certainly doesn't equal smart. And computer illiterate sure doesn't mean stupid.
Which do we need more: computer literacy or literacy?”
― Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian

“As much as I love computers, I can't imagine getting an excellent education from any multimedia system. Rather than augmenting the teacher, these machines steal limited class time and direct attention away from scholarship and toward pretty graphics.”
― Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian

“And indeed, people are almost always confronting what computer
science regards as the hard cases. Up against such hard cases, effective algorithms make assumptions, show a bias toward simpler solutions, trade off the costs of error against the costs of delay, and take chances.
These aren’t the concessions we make when we can’t be
rational. They’re what being rational means.”
― Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

“And indeed, people are almost always confronting what computer science regards as the hard cases. Up against such hard cases, effective algorithms make assumptions, show a bias toward simpler solutions, trade off the costs of error against the costs of delay, and take chances. These aren’t the concessions we make when we can’t be rational. They’re what being rational means.”
― Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

“Since large programs grow from small ones, it is crucial that we develop an arsenal of standard program structures of whose correctness we have become sure—we call them idioms—and learn to combine them into larger structures using organizational techniques of proven value.”
― Alan J. Perlis, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“Coding Sonnet

One of the most powerful tools of science is coding,
A string of illegible characters can make or break a society.
145,000 lines of code landed Armstrong 'n Aldrin on the moon,
And 2 billion of them are working to satisfy everyday curiosity.
But this awesome force is still used mostly to generate revenue,
Welfare of humanity isn't a priority here, but a mere suggestion.
That's why the coding marvel that set out to connect the world,
Has become a playground for conspiracy, bigotry and division.
Learn from the horrific blunders of society's founding coders,
Make humanity the primary command of every code you write.
A code that doesn't lift the society is nothing but a hideous bug,
Zeros and Ones know no good or bad, unless by you it is defined.
Uncle Ben once said, with great power comes great responsibility.
I say to you today, a humane code facilitates a humane society.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“In a technologically advanced world, the most powerful nation is not the one with nuclear power, but the one with coding power.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

“Nell'IA, è il risultato che conta, non se l'agente o il suo comportamento sia intelligente. Per questo, l'IA non concerne la capacità di riprodurre l'intelligenza umana, ma in realtà la capacità di farne a meno.”
― Floridi Luciano

“Humanizing AI (The Sonnet)

You can code tasks,
But not consciousness.
You can code phony feelings,
But definitely not sentience.
Nobody can bring a machine to life,
No matter how complex you make it.
But once a machine is complex enough,
It might develop awareness by accident.
So let us focus on humanizing AI,
By removing biases from algorithms,
Rather than dehumanizing AI,
By aiming for a future without humans.
Rich kids with rich dreams make good movies.
Be human first and use AI to equalize communities.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

“We have to place our attention on humanizing artificial intelligence by removing the biases from algorithms rather than dehumanizing it.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systems and you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.”
― Joe Armstrong

“The most depressing thing about life as a programmer, I think, is if you’re faced with a chunk of code that either someone else wrote or, worse still, you wrote yourself but you no longer dare to modify. That’s depressing.”
― Petey Jones

“I often end up rewriting. Sometimes I do that without ever finding the bug. I get to the point where I can just feel that it’s in this part here. I’m just not very comfortable about this part. It’s a mess. It really shouldn’t be that way. Rather than tweak it a little bit at a time, I’ll just throw away a couple hundred lines of code, rewrite it from scratch, and often then the bug is gone. Sometimes I feel guilty about that. Is that a failure on my part? I didn’t understand what the bug was. I didn’t find the bug. I just dropped a bomb on the house and blew up all the bugs and built a new house. In some sense, the bug eluded me. But if it becomes the right solution, maybe it’s OK. You’ve done it faster than you would have by finding it.”
― Peter Norvig

“Norvig: At one point I had it as my monitor stand because it was one of the biggest set of books I had, and it was just the right height. That was nice because it was always there, and I guess then I was more prone to use it as a reference because it was just right in front of me. Seibel: But you had to lift up the monitor every time you wanted to look at it?
Norvig: No, I had the box set. You had to pull hard, but you could pull one of the box. Now I’m less likely to use any book for reference—I’m just likely to do a search.”
― Peter Norvig

“One of the interesting things we found, when trying to predict how well somebody we’ve hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.

Seibel: But you had to do well enough on something else that you actually got hired?

Norvig: Right, so that’s the thing. Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn’t hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, “I have to hire this person because I see something in him that’s so great, and this guy who thought he was no good is wrong, and I’ve got to stand up for him and put my reputation on the line.”
― Peter Norvig

“I literally have to turn off the computer because if the fan is whirring behind me there’s the lure of “Check your email, check your email.” So I’ll turn it off or at least put it to sleep, come over to this table on the other side of the room, and spread out my papers and think. Or work at the whiteboard or something.”
― Guy Steele

“I think it’s not an accident that we often use the imagery of magic to describe programming. We speak of computing wizards and we think of things happening by magic or automagically. And I think that’s because being able to get a machine to do what you want is the closest thing we’ve got in technology to adolescent wish-fulfillment.”
― Guy Steele

“the lesson I should have drawn is there may be more than one bug here and I should have looked harder the first time. But another lesson is that if a bug is thought to be rare, then looking at rarely executed paths may be fruitful. And a third thing is, having good documentation about what the algorithm is trying to do, namely a reference back to Knuth, was just great.”
― Guy Steele

“I don’t know that you’re that far out on the spectrum, at least among the people I’ve talked to for this book. Though Don Knuth did write TeX in pencil in a notebook for six months before he typed in a line of code and he said he saved time because he didn’t have to bother writing scaffolding to test all the code he was developing because he just wrote the whole thing.”
― Seibel, Coders at Work: Reflections On The Craft Of Programming

“In terms of a place to start, immediate gratification has always worked for me.”
― Dan Ingalls

“It isn’t that young people learn that much faster; it’s just they have more time. When I would put time in, I made progress.”
― Dan Ingalls

“And I knew them by name and reputation. And they were still doing fun things. To me, work was work and these guys weren’t working. They were having a good time. Just like school.”
― Ken Thompson

“When it’s hard to work on. I do it much quicker than most people do. I’ll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard. I’ll throw it away and start over and come up with a different partitioning that makes it easy to do whatever I wanted to do. I’m really quick on the trigger for throwing stuff out.”
― Ken Thompson