Gray Watson's Quote List
Computers
- The irony of the information age is that it lends credibility to
uninformed opinion. -- Stephen Coonts??
- Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more
liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans
(especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to
our ability to process and understand complexity. -- Eric Raymond from
linuxjournal.com.
- [Perl is] a swiss-army gasoline-powered chainsaw -- Geoff Collyer
on the Plan9 fan mailing list.
- The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard,
and it does not solve the problem well. -- Phil Wadler, POPL 2003
- Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X"
label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days,
before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document
written on another computer, another word processor, or another
network. -- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
- Innovation means nothing if its incomprehensible. -- Scott Raven,
Lycos software engineer during an architecture review.
- The question of whether computers can think is like the question
of whether submarines can swim. -- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
- As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that
it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging
had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I
realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be
spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -- Maurice Wilkes
discovers debugging, 1949
- Win NT, well, I suppose that's better than paying for it. --
Steve O'Hara-Smith
- When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a
thumb. -- Steve Haflich (comp.lang.c++)
- The Web isn't better than sex, but sliced bread is in serious
trouble. -- unknown
- We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million
typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. -- Robert
Wilensky
- Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have
boiled down into three principles:
- Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right
wizard, they can make it work.
- Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't.
- PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.
-- Philip Greenspun
- .. the Twentieth Century, the innovative century that brought you
WW I, WW II, and WWW. -- Bill Higgins .sig
- Right now, we're all street people on the information highway;
we can't protect our privacy and information; we can't prove who we
are; we can't buy anything. -- Nathan Myrhvold, senior VP of Advanced
Technology at MS
- The problem with the global village is all the global village
idiots. -- P. Ginsparg
- Microsoft - We put the "backwards" into backwards
compatibility. -- Anonymous sig.
- Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix,
although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not
consider this an achievement. -- MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab job
ad written by Hal Abelson (1992)
- Emacs isn't just a program... it's a way of life. -- Chris
Maeda, (May 8, 1991)
- Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX. -- Tom
Christaensen
- Not having sendmail is like not having VD. -- R. Heiby .sig
- I just found out that the brain is like a computer. If that's
true, then there really aren't any stupid people. Just people running
DOS. -- VH1's 'Stand Up Spotlight'
- Windows/NT - From the people who brought you EDLIN. --
rec.humor.funny / yucks volume 3.20
- Ok, so now we're going from the Death Star to the Borg. --
overheard on the net re: Novell's buyout of USL
- In computer science, we stand on each other's feet. -- Brian
K. Reid
- Outlawing cryptography is like outlawing pencils because
bookies use them to record bets. -- John Perry Barlow, EFF-Austin
Cryptography Conference (October 1993)
- The blizzard of anguished ASCII it summoned forth on the
Net... -- John Perry Barlow, Re: Clipper/Skipjack announcement
(October 1993)
- The speed is a pain, but better than a 1/2 hour drive across
Munich. -- Bernhard Schneck, Re: disk NFS-mounted via PPP (1993)
- Our mailing lists (and their repeater newsgroups) are only for
the purpose of promoting proprietary software. -- Richard Stallman,
(Feb 18, 1992)
- There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in
their home. -- Ken Olson, DEC President (1977)
Memory Debug
Free Spam Protection
ORMLite Java ORM