-*-paragraph-indent-text-*- Quotation confesses inferiority. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson What if this weren't a hypothetical question? -- unknown On a clear disk you can seek forever -- Me Software is a gas. It expands to fill its container. -- Nathan Myhrvold's Law Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks. -- Dennis Ritchie (about X Windows, at the 1990 Usenix) From an operating system research point of view, Unix is -- if not dead -- certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it. -- Dennis Ritchie (at the 1990 Usenix) I before E; except when your foreign neighbour Keith received eight counterfeit sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird. -- En Glish I before e except after c has been disproved by science -- En Glish 'I' before 'e', except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbour. -- unknown If liberty means anything, it is the right to tell people things they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell Don't mode me in! -- Larry Tesler Political writing in this day is the defense of the indefensible. -- George Orwell It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be safely relegated to anyone if machines were used. -- Baron Gottfried Wilhem Von Leibnitz (1646-1716) On a clear day you can see about 3.2 miles if you are 6 feet tall. In order to be able to see 100 miles over water, you would have to be more than a mile above the water. Standing on land at a height of 450 feet, however, you could see the top of a 3,000 foot high mountain that is 100 miles away. -- Farmer's Almanac If you can't tell the woods from the forest, you must be from the East. -- I.J.M. ITUP, circa 1989 That's about as portable as a battleship on dry land! -- George Shaffner, X/Open CEO, Nov. 1992 Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. -- George Eliot, Theophrastus Such The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. -- John Stuart Mill | "Unencumbered with facts as I am, I will | comment." | -Drew Lawson in alt.folklore.computers; | now the official Usenet Motto Love makes the time pass. Time makes love pass. -- French Proverb I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. -- Thoreau I shall pass through this world but once. If, therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do, let me do it now; let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. -- E. de Grellet > -- > Boris Goldowsky The only way you'll end up in a corner > Is by walking in too straight of a li > boris@cs.rochester.edu --Claudia Schmidt n > 57 Glasgow Street, Rochester, NY 14608 e > -- > ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._. > Felix Finch, scarecrow repairer, rocket surgeon / felix@crowfix.com > PGP = 91 B3 94 7C E9 E8 76 2D E1 63 51 AA A0 48 89 2F > I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o Note that the GPL [copyright] is like Quantum Mechanics in a sense, in that in only kicks in when there is a ``distribution'' [like an ``observation''.] -- Roland Dowdeswell, Aug. 2002 (on ) Patent and copyright law are anti-competitive, artificial state grants of monopoly privilege with their roots in mercantilism, protectionism, censorship and thought control. -- Stephan Kinsella I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others. -- John Perry Barlow Copying isn't theft, and it isn't piracy. It's what we did for millennia until the invention of copyright, and we can do it again, if we don't hobble ourselves with the antiquated remnants of a censorship system from the sixteenth century. -- Karl Fogel Pro-patent programmers are like pro-KFC chickens. -- Casey Muratori Science Fiction is an inoculation against carpal tunnel vision. -- Spider Robinson, 1996 If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much {room|space}. -- a common bumper sticker slogan? If a person offends you and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures. Simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. -- Mark Twain ("Advice to Youth" Speech, 1882) Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. -- Abraham Lincoln C++ is the anti-Scheme -- me? Unknown? 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 More good code has been written in languages denounced as ``bad'' than in languages proclaimed ``wonderful'' -- much more. -- Bjarne Stroustrup, "The Design and Evolution of C++" (1994) (sadly this is very true) If a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. -- Paul Graham With C++, it's possible to make code that isn't understandable by anyone, with C, this is very hard. -- Mike Abrash Most people know about 40% of C++. It's not often the same 40% as anyone else, though. -- Ozan Yigit C++ is more of a rube-goldberg type thing full of high-voltages, large chain-driven gears, sharp edges, exploding widgets, and spots to get your fingers crushed. And because of it’s complexity many (if not most) of it’s users don’t know how it works, and can’t tell ahead of time what’s going to cause them to loose an arm. -— Grant Edwards If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one? -- Tom Cargill C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung -- Forwarded-by: guy@netapp.com (Guy Harris) C++ is like jamming a helicopter inside a Miata and expecting some sort of improvement. -- Drew Olbrich C++ : an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog --unknown ... any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really *would* prefer to piss off.... C++ leads to really really bad design choices. -- Linus Torvalds (in comp.version-control.git) Java, the best argument for Smalltalk since C++. -- unknown Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest. -- Larry O'Brien (editor, Software Development) The first rule of JavaScript is: Do not use JavaScript. -- unknown I read the official book twice. I liked the language [Rust] when all I knew about it was the book. Then I tried to actually use it... -- Eric S. Raymond (in a comment on his Armed and Dangerous blog) Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. -- C.A.R. Hoare We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. -- Donald Knuth (re-quoting Tony Hoare) The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. The terrible temptation to tweak should be resisted unless the payoff is really noticeable. --Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy (paraprhasing Tony Hoare) make your code usable before you try to make it reusable -- Casey Muratori (https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html) I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought such noise? -- Richard P. Gabriel Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. [...] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program. -- C.A.R. Hoare; Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 17 July 2002, Cambridge, England; Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. -- Dennis Ritchie When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd. -- Dennis Ritchie Standards committees are not the best ways to create a standard. -- Dennis Ritchie C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group. -- Dennis Ritchie It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra 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. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. -- C.A.R. Hoare, "The Emperor's Old Clothes", 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture, CACM vol. 24 no. 2, February 1981 (the first part seems to somewhat paraphrase Einstein's "simple as possible" quote) Inside every large program there is a small program trying to get out. -- C.A.R. Hoare Europeans call me by name: knee-clouse veert; Americans call me by value: nickel's worth. -- Niklaus Wirth A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built. -- Niklaus Wirth A programmer's competence should be judged by the ability to find simple solutions. -- Niklaus Wirth Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing. -- Dick Brandon When the code and the comments disagree, both are probably wrong. -- Norman Schryer I think not. -- Descartes' last words? Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than that sword. -- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton(Baron Lytton); _Richelieu_(1838) II.ii Beneath the rule of women entirely great, the InterNet is Mightier than the pen. -- Karen Bryden (esq); (unpublished) It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. -- à la "Dune"; Kerry Lutz Everybody is somebody else's weirdo. -- Dykstra Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into the new order. -- H. Hess. (1) Everything depends. (2) Nothing is always. (3) Everything is sometimes. Don't walk in front of me, I might be unable to follow you. Don't walk after me, I might be unable to lead you. Just walk by my side and be my friend. From a sign off I80 in Nevada: Next Exit Freedom Valley No Hitchhiking Prison Area "Tra la la boom de ay We have no school today Our teacher passed away We shot her yesterday We threw her in the bay She scared the sharks away And when we pulled her out She smelled like sauerkraut " -- Kids I'm still trying to figure out what the real perceived problem is! -- Kyle Jones in e-mail to the bug-vm list /* Amir J. Katz email: amir@ddddf.com */ /* Fourth Dimension Software, LTD., Tel-Aviv, ISRAEL */ /* ... Any closet is a walk-in closet if you try hard enough ... */ /* ... (Steven Wright) ... */ An idea is salvation by imagination. -- Frank Lloyd Wright There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline. -- Montaigne He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder. -- M. C. Escher DoD: bachelor(n), One who never Mrs. a girl. -- unknown I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it. -- Thomas Jefferson, to A. Stuart, 1791 All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression. -- Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural, 1801 The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. -- Thomas Jefferson, to Carrington, 1787 It is however an evil for which there is no remedy, our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. -- Thomas Jefferson, to Dr. Currie, 1786 A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. -- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1787/01/30 The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. -- Thomas Jefferson, to W.S. Smith, 1787/11/13 I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. -- Thomas Jefferson, to George Logan, in a 1816 letter I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war -- Abraham Lincoln, 1864, in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins This is the Great Theatre Of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good night. -- Robertson Davies An organization that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. -- B. Stroustrup Long, long ago in a galaxy not so far away, lead by a rag tag fleet of wary UNIX hackers battling against the dark forces of the Redmond soft- ware giant................... -- Luke Netwalker (as played by Matthew James Marnell) Take away the right to say 'fuck' and you take away the right to say 'fuck the government.' -- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966) I use NFS but I don't inhale. -- James Graham ``--*greywolf;'' (13 Mar 1996) Read not to contradict or refute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. -- Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" A computer is a universal machine and I have proved how it can perform any task that can be described in symbols. I would go further. It is my view that a computer can perform any task that the human brain can carry out. Any task... -- Alan Turing (1912-1954) You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace yourself. -- "Mostly Harmless" by Douglas Adams To A Quick Young Fox: Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp, Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice? Guy fed by work, quiz Jove's xanthic lamp -- Zow! Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice. -- Lazy Dog Sparrowfart: The amount of force necessary to accelerate one hillabeans of mass at the rate of one pianotoss per while squared. There is no windchill at absolute zero. -- from the signature of Doug Masson, Indiana University School of Law I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough? -- anonymous Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -- C.S. Lewis, _God in the Dock_ VAX. For those who care enough to steal the very best. -- A microscopic message on the silicon chip inside one of Digital Equipment's often-stolen computer designs. The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases. -- Sir Josiah Stamp Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information. There's no such thing as information overload. -- Edward Tufte Because user errors often produce unpredictable results, the user should try to avoid them. -- IBM MVS/XA System Programming Library. Reality *is*; there's no use arguing about it or voting on it. -- Steven M. Bellovin (?) Penis Envy is a total Phallusy. -- unknown ``... Our continuing mission: To seek out knowledge of C, to explore strange UNIX commands, and to boldly code where no one has man page 4.'' -- unknown (from .sig of Steffan Henke ) ``... the only way to secure NT is with an ax.'' -- Jeremy Brinkley, System Administrator Stanford Blood Center, jdbrinkley1@stanford.edu Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. -- Captain Jeffrey Spaulding -- from the sig of Eddie McCreary The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10 Lisp is a programmer amplifier. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10 I have heard more than one LISP advocate state such subjective comments as, "LISP is the most powerful and elegant programming language in the world" and expect such comments to be taken as objective truth. I have never heard a Java, C++, C, Perl, or Python advocate make the same claim about their own language of choice. -- Guy Steele Lisp, the perennial tie dye of languages. -- Dave Cheney To me vi is Zen. To use vi is to practice zen. Every command is a koan. Profound to the user, unintelligible to the uninitiated. You discover truth everytime you use it. -- The best thing about the Internet is that it absorbs the attention of tens of thousands of people whom everyone would like to keep off the streets and away from our children. -- Garrison Keillor October 8, 1997 Foolish speculation. As one who rode for 28 years without a helmet, I've probably hit every bug you have and can testify that they do not have the impact you imagine. A helmet is irresistable, while flesh yields - and beards do wonders for merely capturing the pests, allowing them to emerge unexpectedly hours later to provide a midnight snack. -- ??? A truly experienced rider can tell by the impact whether the bug is one of the sweet desirable ones or the spitin variety. You helmeted types will remain ignorant and undernourished. -- john stafford I've come into setups with a strong firewall keeping people from getting out, but allowing anyone to get in ("you know, I didn't really understand that source/destination thing; it that bad?"). I like IPfilter because it's tough to use without [editor of choice]. If you can't use a command line, odds are you don't know enough networking to build a secure firewall. -- chuck+ipfilter@snew.com They that would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance . . . [C]ommercial pressure . . . will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad, from prospecting to mining a known lode. -- Dennis Ritchie, Communications of the ACM, August, 1984 If you ever reach total enlightenment while you're drinking a beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose. -- anonymous Heuer's Law: Any feature is a bug unless it can be turned off. Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. -- Buddha This is what's wrong with Perl: "there's more than one way to do it" ignores the fact that most of those ways are really, really dumb. Those who write programming tools have the responsibility to not lead bad programmers into temptation. Because most programmers are bad programmers, and we all have to pay the price for their mistakes. -- Jamie Zawinski The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a _programmer_ is doing until it’s too late. -- Seymour Cray VAX! VAX! Often mounted in large racks. VAX! VAX! Set on a floor, they cause cracks. VAX! VAX! Moving them yields heart attacks. VAX! VAX! Mother of BSD and other hacks. -- unknown BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC. -- unknown Linux, by amateurs, for amateurs. -- Dave Presotto Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20. -- Dennis Ritchie Here lies an Atheist. All dressed up And no place to go. -- On a tombstone in a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery. In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. -- Carl Sagan (1934-1996), 1987 CSICOP keynote address. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968. Maybe if NASA built one of those [a Star Trek Enterprise-class star ship] instead of another LEO space station [then] maybe Americans would be interested in the space program again. -- Kyle Jones , commenting on the ASCII-art image of one in someone's signature from a posting to the info-vm mailing list. "His brain is loud." -- Alan Nerenberg in "Crossed Wires", Saturday Night Magazine, Oct. 1999 The only way to convince some people that HTML is about content, not style is with a 2x4 . -- Geoff. Lane Irix [Linux?] is about as stable as a one-legged drunk with hypothermia in a four-hundred mile an hour wind, balancing on a banana peel on a greased cookie sheet when someone tosses him an elephant with bad breath and a worse temper. -- Simon Cozens The best answer when anybody asks you if you're any good with explosives is to simply hold up both open hands and say "Ten". -- Anthony DeBoer Dennis Ritchie: "So fsck was originally called something else" Question: "What was it called?" Dennis Ritchie: Well, the second letter was different. -- Q&A at Usenix Free Software vs. the rest of the world: A: "This is nice, if crude. How do I make it do this?" B: "Here's the source code. Have fun!" (meant usefully, taken otherwise) A: "No, no, I don't even have a compiler." (moment of puzzlement in B's mind) "How do I make it do this?" B: "Well, I suppose you could do it by writing Perl scripts that fit in here and here." A: "No, I mean by real people." (B wonders what he/she qualifies as) "What large software conglomerate to I talk to to get some of their developers to consider putting this feature into the next version?" B: "Well, I suppose you could form one, if you've got a good relationship with a banker and a lawyer. In the meantime, here's the email addresses of the guys who are maintaining and enhancing the program on a volunteer basis." (A wonders what planet he/she is on, and if it's possible to get back to Earth. Real humans don't write stuff like that without being paid.) A: "Um, do you have a help desk?" B: "Here's the URL of the Faq-O-Matic. Will that help?" -- , Dec. 30, 1999 in info-cvs@gnu.org I will contend that conceptual integrity is *the* most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. "Aristocracy, Democracy, and System Design" _The Mythical Man-Month_ My point really is that Brooks has written a wonderful book, but a lot of people are simply not equipped with the necessary mental models and background knowledge to understand what The Old Man is talking about. -- Poul-Henning Kamp (discussing Frederick P. Brooks's "The Design of Design") Bill Gates is worth $97 billion. Ninety-seven billion [dollars], that is equal to the net worth of 120 *million* Americans. How did he get that rich? He ain't that smart. -- Michael Moore, Film Maker. Microsoft is the only fortune 500 company named after its founder's genitals. -- Anonymous Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. -- Bill Gates (ironically) A good government is one "which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned." -- Thomas Jefferson (from his inaugural address) As we enjoy great advantages from inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1742 Social graces are the packet headers of everyday life. -- unknown (seen in .sig from Joe Block ) Philosophy of a Clown (or a One-Man-Band): People are really nice to you when you seem a little off centre and non-threatening. -- Samantha Potter There is never a hostmaster on Friday the 13th! -- Andreas Wrede There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things and cache invalidation. -- Phil Karlton Programming is debugging a blank sheet of paper. -- Gerald Sussman Specifications, design, and coding can be done at any speed -- only debugging takes time. -- Gerald M. Weinberg Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian Kernighan Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra Why do we teach different disciplines at our Universities? Why don't we teach all our students just "knowledge"? The answer is simple: our human skulls are too small and our days are too short. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra (EWD562, p.1) Exceptions are fine for quick-and-dirty code, for scripts, and for code that is neither mission critical nor life-sustaining. But if you’re writing an operating system, or a nuclear power plant, or the software to control a high speed circular saw used in open heart surgery, exceptions are extremely dangerous. -- Joel Spolsky I have found that humans often use Smalltalk during awkward moments. -- Commander Data, ST TNG Smalltalk is dangerous. It is a drug. My advice to you would be don't try it; it could ruin your life. -- Andy Bower Object orientation is in the mind, not in the compiler. -- Alan Cox Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. -- Edsger Dijkstra Object oriented programs are offered as alternatives to correct ones. -- Edsger Dijkstra object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing. -- Rob Pike Object-oriented programming, whose essence is nothing more than programming using data with associated behaviors, is a powerful idea. It truly is. But it's not always the best idea. And it is not well served by the epistemology heaped upon it. Sometimes data is just data and functions are just functions. -- Rob Pike (on Google+) The phrase "object-oriented" means a lot of things. Half are obvious, and the other half are mistakes. -- Paul Graham Whatever the advantages of planning, they're often outweighed by the advantages of being able to keep a program in your head. -- Paul Graham Implementation inheritance causes the same intertwining and brittleness that have been observed when goto statements are overused. As a result, OO systems often suffer from complexity and lack of reuse. -- John Ousterhout Scripting, IEEE Computer, March 1998 Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function. -- John Carmack The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. -- Joe Armstrong I used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I’m now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy. -- Eric Allman Object systems are typically characterized by four basic components: identity, state, behavior and encapsulation. ... Relational systems describe a form of knowledge storage and retrieval based on predicate logic and truth statements. ... A relation is, at its heart, a truth predicate about the world, a statement of facts (attributes) that provide meaning to the predicate. -- Ted Neward, on the problems of Object/Relational Mapping (http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/the-vietnam-of-computer-science/) I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. --Alan Kay The object-oriented version of spaghetti code is, of course, 'lasagna code'. Too many layers. -- Roberto Waltman If you know what you're doing, three layers is enough; if you don't, even seventeen levels won't help. -- Michael Padlipsky The Elements of Networking Style iUniverse.com 2000 ISBN 0-595-08879-1 I was introduced to "object oriented programming" when I was 18, and it took me until I was about 24 to realize it was all a load of horseshit. -- Casey Muratori (https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html) The fallacy of "object-oriented programming" is exactly that: that code is at all "object-oriented". It isn't. Code is procedurally oriented, and the "objects" are simply constructs that arise that allow procedures to be reused. -- Casey Muratori (https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html) OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them. --Alan Kay So the problem is -- I've said this about both Smalltalk and Lisp -- they tend to eat their young. What I mean is that both Lisp and Smalltalk are really fabulous vehicles, because they have a meta-system. They have so many ways of dealing with problems that the early-binding languages don't have, that it's very, very difficult for people who like LISP or Smalltalk to imagine anything else. --Alan Kay Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. --Alan Kay Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. -- Niels Bohr However, Alan Kay's well-known saying "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" goes back to the Hungarian physicist and Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor: We cannot predict the future at all, we can only invent it. (Wir können die Zukunft gar nicht vorhersagen, wir können sie allenfalls erfinden.) -- Dennis Gabor, in "Menschheit morgen", 1965 (englisch: "Inventing the future" or literally "Mankind tomorrow") Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy The best way to predict the future is to invent it! -- Alan Kay The best way to predict the future is to prevent it. -- Alan Kay (2012/06/15) Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS. -- Alan Kay The tree of research must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of bean counters. -- Alan Kay Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. -- Alan Kay Simple things should be simple and complex things should be as simple as possible. -- Alan Kay [[... this is probably the correct quote ...]] Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible. -- Alan Kay [[... this one is too simple -- the one above is likely correct. ...]] I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing. -- Alan Kay An x86 cpu is a waste of perfectly good sand. -- tim Rowledge (~1985) It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. -- Albert Einstein From “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” the Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, June 10, 1933. I also remember a remark of Albert Einstein, which certainly applies to music. He said, in effect, that everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler! -- Roger Sessions The New York Times, January 8, 1950 “How a ‘Difficult’ Composer Gets That Way” Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery French writer (1900 - 1944) If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? -- Albert Einstein A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. -- Albert Einstein I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience.... How would they know? -- Marvin Minsky An Interface is what gets in between you and what you want to do. -- Carl Havermiste Having the source code is the difference between buying a house and renting an apartment. -- Behlendorf Wives live longer than husbands because they're not married to women. -- Colin Mochrie As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture. -- John McCarthy Java programming is like teenage sex .... - Everyone talks about it all of the time (but they don't really know what they are talking about); - Everyone claims to be doing it; - Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it; - Those few who are actually doing it: - Are not practicing it safely; - Are doing it poorly, and - Are sure it will be better next time. -- From a post on comp.lang.smalltalk Closed source software is not evil, nor is it necessarily inferior in quality to open source. What is certain, however, is that closed source and closed protocols do not serve the public interest; they exist by definition to serve the bottom line of a corporation. [[or government]] -- the Xiphophorus company The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell 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 Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down. -- Collis P. Huntingdon A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. -- Leslie Lamport, as quoted in CACM, June 1992 A well known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise was standing on?" "You're very clever young man, very clever," replied the old woman, "but it's turtles all the way down!" -- told by Stephen Hawking (in "A Brief History of Time", p.1) -- also told by Thomas King as an old Native American story The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. -- Stephen Hawking The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world. -- Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between two. This you cannot do without temperance. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (journal, Jan. 26, 1844) [[Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.]] Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; you shal begin it well and serenely, and with to high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (letter to one of his daughters, away from home at school) Unified Modeling Language (UML): Industrial strength, vigorous hand-waving at its best. The CS equivalent of an elephant dump. -- Ozan Yigit (in his "computer science hall of shame") An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow field. -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by Homo Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history. -- Lazarus Long, from "Time Enough For Love" by R. Heinlein If God can do anything he can make a stone so heavy that even he can't lift it. Then there is something God cannot do, he cannot lift the stone. Therefore God does not exist. -- Lucretius, Roman poet Strange... a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! -- Mark Twain You pay for people to bend over backwards and say yes. It doesn't happen for free. -- Matt Fretwell(sp?) on postfix-users Then you decide to recode the guy's Perl script in C because you are tired of having to sleep with a friggin Challenge-S in your nightmares. You turn that 500K+400 byte Perl script into a nice compact 8K executable. Does the same damn thing, only it's real teeny-like. Nobody can belive it! You save the company from losing a major client! Your boss gives you his car! Women flock to be with you! Your teeth become Perl-y white! -- Jonathan Yarden, Internet Tool & Die (on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi) I like Perl, a lot, but I don't think that its really appropriate for "system" level things. Its just too heavyweight. -- Ronald F. Guilmette on postfix-users Regarding a PhD friend who regularly buys lottery tickets: "Obviously the PhD hasn't penetrated into all the recesses of their mind..." -- Ralph Nader (in his keynote speach at a conference about gambling held in Nova Scotia on 2004/10/04) That looks like a CISCO router in SMTP screw-up mode. -- Wietse Venema (on postfix-users) The category of people who come closest to the objective truth about themselves, as measured by outsiders, are the clinically depressed. -- Brian Bethune (in a Macleans Oct. 9, 2006 Science column about the book "A Mind of its OWN" by English psychologist Cordelia Fine) You miss 100% of the shots you never take. -- Wayne Gretzky If you're going through hell, keep going. -- Winston Churchill A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. -- Robert Heinlein I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. -- Stephen Roberts Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people. -- Theodore Parker [...] we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. -- Abraham Lincoln (Gettysburg Address) America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. -- Abraham Lincoln Before we leave this matter I wish to comment on the theory implied by you, Mr Weems, when you claimed damage to your client. There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is supported neither by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all. -- Robert A. Heinlein's character, the Judge, Life-Line (1939) I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. -- William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago The human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress. Natural selection is simply the process by which life-forms change to suit the myriad opportunities afforded by the physical environment and by other life-forms -- Matt Ridley (Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.) I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience [[or in religion -gaw]]. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. -- Carl Sagan Science is not about what's true, or what might be true. Science is about what people with originally diverse viewpoints can be forced to believe by the weight of public evidence. -- Lee Smolin The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. -- Dorthy Parker It would be as if 16th century monarchs proclaimed that "we need not go to the New World, we have already been there." Or as if President Thomas Jefferson announced in 1803 that Americans "need not go west of the Mississippi, the Lewis and Clark Expedition has already been there." -- Neil Armstrong (in a letter to NPR's Robert Krulwich in December 2010 regarding his amazement about people who don't think we need to go to the moon again) There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning "ripping off" software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won't be "stolen". -- Jim Warren, July 1976 ... Sexual intellectuals. They’re fucking know-it-alls, that’s what. -- Chuck Yaeger We should learn (and teach) mathematics with a better understanding of why the math was developed, when it was developed and who developed it. We can’t always use primary sources, obviously, but it is better to learn math with an understanding of its historical context rather than do it in a vacuum. -- Murray Bourne Lehman and Belady have studied the history of successive releases in a large operating system. They find that the total number of modules increases linearly with release number, but that the number of modules affected increases exponentially with release number. All repairs tend to destroy the structure, to increase the entropy and disorder of the system. Less and less effort is spent on fixing original design flaws; more and more is spent on fixing flaws introduced by earlier fixes. As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing ceases to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one. Although in principle usable forever, the system has worn out as a base for progress. Furthermore, machines change, configurations change, and user requirements change, so the system is not in fact usable forever. A brand-new, from-the-ground-up redesign is necessary. -- Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month", about IBM OS/360 Things are always at their best in the beginning. -- Pascal That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended -- civilizations are built up -- excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. -- C. S. Lewis ("Mere Christianity", Book 2, Chapter 3) (a good quote, if it wasn't from such an un-critical thinker) Our brains, which art in our heads, treasured be thy name. Thy reasoning come. Thy best you can do be done on earth as it is. Give us this day new insight to help us resolve conflicts and ease pain. And lead us not into supernatural explanations; deliver us from denial of logic. For thine is the kingdom of reason, and even though thy powers are limited, and you're not always glorious you are the best evolutionary adaptation we have for helping this earth now and forever and ever. So be it. -- athiest's "prayer" I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful. -- Stephen Hawking Faith: not wanting to know what is true. -- Friedrich Nietzsche This is my _workbench_, dammit, it’s not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. When I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I’m profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer. -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp, Feb. 16, 1997 Life is too short for proprietary software. -- unknown A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP -- Leonard Nimoy (@TheRealNimoy) February 23, 2015 Answer: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Question: Why is it such a bad thing? Answer: Top-posting. Question: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail? -- from the Internets.... Trying to remove your data from the web is like trying to remove pee from a swimming pool. -- from the Internets.... XML - S-exprs done wrong -- Uriel, cat-v.org The Six Stages of Debugging: 1. That can't happen. 2. That doesn't happen on my machine. 3. That shouldn't happen. 4. Why is that happening? 5. Oh, I see. 6. How did that ever work? -- Mike W. Cremer (http://mwcremer.blogspot.ca/2007/06/six-stages-of-debugging.html) It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes becomes a warning, It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. -- The Programmer's Mantra (parodied from the Mentat Mantra in David Lynch's "Dune" (film)) I'm a low-altitude motorcycle pilot -- Rick Falkvinge Postmodern Databases: an absence of objective truth; Queries return opinions rather than facts -- Richard Hipp, on NoSQL "databases" Think of it this way: threads are like salt, not like pasta. You like salt, I like salt, we all like salt. But we eat more pasta. -- Larry McVoy A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines. -- Alan Cox To whom? To me? To someone wishing they were Canadian? To someone waiting in line for a doctor? To someone listening to a loon out on the lake? To someone wishing that the flag had blue in it? Truth be told when you get right down to it, this is what it means to be Canadian. In 1954, coming back from Finland on my way home, I went through Holland. Through the Netherlands. They thought I was American. They were decent to me. Courteous. But when someone asked what part of the States I was from, I said, "No, not me, I’m Canadian." And they started to cry, the older ones, and they all ran and embraced me and took me inside and fed me and invited neighbours in to see me saying something like "hij is een Canadees." I’ve never forgotten sitting there proudly thinking this is what it is to be Canadian. This is what my cousin Lew, shot by a sniper not far from here two days after D-Day, was fighting for. For this, and for me. -- Donald Sutherland (in answer to "What does it mean to be Canadian?") I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because the judgement and intentions of others is often questionable. -- unknown (to which I add: and the need for privacy increases, probably exponentially, with the amount of power the person/agency weighing judgement has.) We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible. -- Allan Massie A Question of Loyalties, 1989 Once upon a time, the internet sucked because it came through the phone. Now the phone sucks because it comes through the internet. -- unknown