_resun > _resun's Quotes

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”
― Brian Kernighan

“Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.”
― Brian W. Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

“Do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won’t do it well anyway.”
― Brian W. Kernighan

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

“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.”
― Donald E. Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Volume 136)

“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

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book.”
― Brian W. Kernighan, The C Programming Language

“The word bit is a contraction of binary digit that was coined by the statistician John Tukey in the mid 1940s.”
― Brian W. Kernighan, D Is for Digital

“Nevertheless, C retains the basic philosophy that programmers know what they are doing; it only requires that they state their intentions explicitly.”
― Brian W. Kernighan, The C Programming Language

“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
― John von Neumann

“Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.”
― John von Neumann

“There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about”
― John von Neumann

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work - that is correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple.”
― John von Neumann

“Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.”
― John von Neumann

“Can we survive technology?”
― John von Neumann

“It is only proper to realize that language is largely a historical accident.”
― John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain

“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.”
― Tom Waits