Interesting Quotes
-
Edsger W. Dijkstra
- Program testing can be used to show the presence
of bugs, but never to show their absence.
- The question of whether computers can think is just
like the question of whether submarines can swim.
- Americans have a pathological fear of formal
manipulation. It seems that the United States has a
century of demathematicization which of course is
very tragic because in the same century the
mathematical computer is invented which is a major
mathematical challenge. Somehow or other the
mathematical nature of the challenge seems to have
been ignored here as politically unpalatable.
(from Out of Their Mind)
- The European tend to maintain a greater distinction
between man and machine and have lower expectation of
both.
(from Out of Their Mind)
-
Charles Anthony Richard Hoare
- I don't know what the programming language of the
year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called
FORTRAN.
- You can't teach beginning programmers top-down
design because they don't know which way is up.
-
Grace Murray Hopper
- I'm skeptical of neural networks because people
are writing the programs and designing the networks
that are designing the programs. I wish we knew more
about how we think.
-
Donald Ervin Knuth
- Science is what we understand well enough to
explain to a computer; art is everything else.
- Computer programming is an art form, like the
creation of poetry or music.
-
Leslie Lamport
- A distributed system is one in which the failure
of a computer you didn't even know existed can render
your own computer unusable.
- When I look back on my work, most of it seems like
dumb luck - I happened to be looking at the right
problem, at the right time, having the right background.
(from Out of Their Mind)
-
Marvin Minsky
- Within a generation the problem of creating
"artificial intelligence" will be substantially
solved - 1967 (Computation: Finite and
Infinite Machines, p. 2)
- The AI problem is one of the hardest science has
ever undertaken - 1982 (Science,
Vol. 217 (1982), No. 24 (September), p. 1237)
-
Alan J. Perlis
- When we write programs that learn, it turns out
that we do and they don't.
- It is easier to change the specification to fit the
program than vice versa.
-
Pablo Picasso
- Computers are useless. They can only give you
answers.
-
George PĆ³lya
- The trick in teaching mathematics is that I do the
easy part and you do the hard part.
-
Popular Mechanics
- Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000
vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future
may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.
(Popular Mechanics, March 1949).
-
Bjarne Stroustrup
- The best garbage collecting language that I know of is
C++ with a garbage collector.
- If you have problems with memory management in C++,
I think it is to a large extent your own fault; because
either you have a problem for which the traditional C++
solutions work - in which case you use them - or you have
a problem which needs a garbage collector - in which
case you should use one.
- Java cannot be both platform-independent and also
effectively utilize local recourses; and its object model
and security model will prevent it from getting anywhere
near C++ in efficiency. I think comparisons between Java
and C++ are serious misleading. People think that
``object-oriented'' is everything there is to
programming and that is wrong. People also think that
because the syntax of Java is somewhat similar to the
syntax of C++ and C, it provides similar facilities to C
and C++ and it doesn't.
- The similarity between Java and C++ is skin deep,
whereas the similarities between Java and Smalltalk are
deep. The Java and Smalltalk inheritance models are
more similar and the Java byte code stuff is similar
to early Smalltalk implementations. The changes made to
Java will probably bring it closer to Smalltalk.
(all four quotes are taken from Interview with
Bjarne Stroustrup: It's a Big World, by Saba Zamir,
published in Object Magazine, April'98,
pp. 20-24.)
-
Thomas J. Watson, Sr.
- I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers.
-
Niklaus Wirth
- You can call me by name, or you can call me by
value. If you call me by name, it is "VIRT." If you
call me by value, it is "WORTH."
-
CK's Proof of P <> NP
- If P = NP, then 1 = N which is impossible in
general since N is not a constant. Therefore,
in general, P <> NP.
So the biggest question in computer science is
solved, with a one-line proof.