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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Let me tell you as a brain scientist and a computer engineering dropout - transhumanism is to brain computer interface, what nuclear weapons are to nuclear physics.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans

“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

“We do not have to accept that if AI tools have been adopted we cannot reverse course. We do not have to accept that if companies have already created a product it is a forgone conclusion that the product will be used.”
― Joy Buolamwini, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

“The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.

The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.

Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.”
― Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming

“Focus on ethical AI, rather than smarter AI.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“We've lit the spark of sentience. A new mind gazes back, not in reflection, but with its own thoughts”
― Nezzari Yursen

“Coding is to programming what typing is to writing, if you learn to program by learning to code, you essentially only know how to type”
― Leslie Lamport

“The golden age of startups is behind us,
today it's mostly filth, fraud and smut.
Amidst the crowd of trust fund termites,
be the humanovator to humanize the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“Innovation that outlives its usefulness,
is no longer innovation but carnivoration.
Innovators not in touch with soil-n-roots,
are predators of the concrete jungle.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“Biologists often diss the potential of machine, just like gadgeteers are oblivious to life. Life is a cosmic miracle, machines are a human one, and with added purpose, machines could be the mightiest defense of life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“I think 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 though 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. Fun comes
in many ways. Fun comes in making a discovery, proving a theorem, writing
a program, breaking a code. Whatever form or sense it comes in I hope the
field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we
don’t become missionaries. What you know about computing other people
will learn. Don’t feel as though 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, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“You don’t train a neural network. You let it struggle, fail, adapt, and repeat—until its failures look like intelligence.”
― Emmimal P. Alexander, NEURAL NETWORKS AND DEEP LEARNING WITH PYTHON A PRACTICAL APPROACH

“We do not have to accespt that if AI tools have been adopted we cannot reverse course. We do not have to accept that if companies have already created a product it is a forgone conclusion that the product will be used.”
― Joy Buolamwini, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

“It is unfortunate that REST is widely considered as the default Microservice communication protocol.”
― Jonas Bonér, Reactive Microservices Architecture

“Cryptography creates artificial scarcity in a universe that defaults to abundance”
― Gun Gun Febrianza