Computer Science Quotes

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.”
― Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science

“Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face.”
― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

“Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.

Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.

Some, downright weird.

But then again, you’d have to be.

To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.”
― Christopher Hopper

“The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.”
― C.A.R. Hoare

“...if you aren't, at any given time, scandalized by code you wrote five or even three years ago, you're not learning anywhere near enough”
― Nick Black

“I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.”
― Alan Kay

“Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.”
― Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out it was an awful lot of fun. Of course the paying customers got shafted every now and then and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them setting them off in new directions and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible sales-men. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.”
― Dennis M. Ritchie

“Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant
to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap
bubble?”
― Alan J Perlis

“You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.”
― Cory Althoff, The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally

“Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.”
― Neal Stephenson

“What's in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“While functions being unable to change state is good because it helps us reason about our programs, there's one problem with that. If a function can't change anything in the world, how is it supposed to tell us what it calculated? In order to tell us what it calculated, it has to change the state of an output device (usually the state of the screen), which then emits photons that travel to our brain and change the state of our mind, man.”
― Miran Lipovača

“In search," Urs (Hölzle) believed, "the discussion was really, How can we outdistance our current system and make it look laughable? That's the best definition of success: if a new system comes out and everyone says, 'Wow, I can't believe we put up with that old thing because it was so primitive and limited compared to this.”
― Douglas Edwards, I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

“How do you get into making video games anyway? Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person told her he hadn't heard of Ichigo. "Well, I learned to program computers in middle school, I got an 800 on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig, and then I went to MIT, which, by the way, is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology with an emphasis on ludic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of. But yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the U.S., so...." Instead, she said, "I like to play games a lot, so I thought I'd see if I could make them.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“In a world run by algorithms of greed write a code that helps 'n heals.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“In a world full of greedy edisons, be a humble Tesla,
Time remembers no oligarch kindly no matter the status.
Only innovators who get engraved in people's heart,
Are the ones who innovate with a humane purpose.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“Computer science is like learning to speak a new language, but instead of talking to people, you're talking to computers.”
― Enamul Haque, The Ultimate Modern Guide to Artificial Intelligence: Including Machine Learning, Deep Learning, IoT, Data Science, Robotics, The Future of Jobs, Required Upskilling and Intelligent Industries

“Horadric Elders Risen Order Elements Set "Heroes" Fire, Earth, Water, Air Rings: The Stone Flame Ring, The Whorl Turn Ring, The Sacred Globe Ring, The Cold Ring Of Aegis.”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“SΦRT = Return Set In Order”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Ifin.Ordered.Set.SΦRT.Time.Returned is a computer paradigm in a methodology that acts like an operating system in a statistical method or function in a controller that returns a set of Hashed Objects in a standard normal distribution.”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“The only way to level up in life is to upgrade your tech knowledge!”
― Arif Naseem

“AI Brain, PIRANDOM > Circlet + Diadem × Ring > Itemizer × Abstracter, Explained : 1111 < 11 < 1, I utilized dependency injection in code for the following. Phi divides into the Pythagorean theorem, and Pi divides into the Sort where Phi is 7 and the Cognitive domain is the point in time, Pythagoras is the Affective domain in space, and Pi is then injected to the fibonacci sequence for time within the range of 7 and 4 at 10 radians to form 3.14 respectively. In conclusion, If I ran this code in a video test to derive a model view projection matrix then this is the only code I would need to create the math core and automate calls to the pixel and vertex shaders Inna GPU.”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2

“building for scale that you don't need is a waste of effort and may lock you into an inflexible design.”
― Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications

“An algorithm is a finite answer to an infinite number of questions.”
― Stephen Cole Kleene

“An understanding of every language-technical detail of a language feature or library component is neither necessary nor sufficient for writing good programs. In fact, an obsession with understanding every little detail is a prescription for awful - overelaborate and overly clever code.”
― Stroustrup Bjarne, The C++ Programming Language

“The key to understanding complicated things is knowing what not to look at.”
― Gerald Jay Sussman

“It’s just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it's ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are 'naturals' at computer programming".”
― Grace Hopper