Computer Science Quotes

“An algorithm must be seen to be believed.”
― Donald Knuth, Leaders in Computing: Changing the digital world

“Perhaps the most important principle for the good algorithm designer is to refuse to be content.”
― Alfred V. Aho

“It can be argued that the computer is humanity’s attempt to replicate the human brain. This is perhaps an unattainable goal. However, unattainable goals often lead to outstanding accomplishment.”
― Ammaar Shaukat Reshi

“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.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Suppose whatever we can recognize we can find. We can if P=NP.”
― Lance Fortnow, The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible

“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".”
― Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“Functions that create values are easier to combine in new ways than functions that directly perform side effects”
― Marijn Haverbeke

“The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“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”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich, Return to Stantasyland

“The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“Bombe atomique hier, bombe informatique aujourd'hui et, demain, bombe génétique?”
― Paul Virilio

“It can be argued that the computer is humanity’s attempt to replicate the human brain. This is perhaps an unattainable goal. However, unattainable goals often lead to outstanding accomplishment.”
― Zubair Saleem Fazal

“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.”
― Nathan L. Ensmenger

“Lilah did little more than sleep and eat and cry, which to me was the most fascinating thing in the entire universe. Why did she cry? When did she sleep? What made her eat a lot one day and little the next? Was she changing with time? I did what any obsessed person would do in such a case: I recorded data, plotted it, calculated statistical correlations. First I just wrote on scraps of paper and made charts on graph paper, but I very quickly became more sophisticated. I wrote computer software to make a beautifully colored plot showing times when Diane fed Lilah, in black; when I fed her, in blue (expressed mother's milk, if you must know); Lilah's fussy times, in angry red; her happy times, in green. I calculated patterns in sleeping times, eating times, length of sleep, amounts eaten.

Then, I did what any obsessed person would do these days; I put it all on the Web.”
― Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

“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.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“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.”
― Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

“jQuery is by far the most widely used library for JavaScript. It is used on more than 50% of websites. Many frameworks, such as Backbone and Twitter’s Bootstrap, are built on top of jQuery. Being able to extend and write plugins for jQuery can not only save lots of time, but also makes code much cleaner and easier to maintain.”
― Robert Duchnik, jQuery Plugin Development In 30 Minutes

“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.”
― Robert Duchnik, jQuery Plugin Development In 30 Minutes

“Reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly. The more I use a piece of code, the more confident and familiar I become with it, which in turn significantly speeds up my development time.”
― Robert Duchnik, jQuery Plugin Development In 30 Minutes

“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.”
― Robert Duchnik, jQuery Plugin Development In 30 Minutes

“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.”
― Robert Duchnik, jQuery Plugin Development In 30 Minutes

“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.”
― Robert Duchnik, jQuery Plugin Development In 30 Minutes

“Q: Why bother doing proofs about programming languages? They are almost always boring if the definitions are right.
A: The definitions are almost always wrong.

- Anonymous”
― Benjamin C. Pierce

“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.”
― Bertrand Meyer

“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.”
― Samir Chopra, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software

“The cost of electrons and photons is getting cheaper all the time!”
― T. Gilling, The STREAM TONE: The Future of Personal Computing?