Quotes About Programming

But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs.

Computers are stupid.

I think psychoanalyze-pinhead is the important lesson of GNU Emacs.

Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated.

If there is ever a science of programming language design, it will probably consist largely of matching languages to the design methods they support.

The CW likes to hold on to its shows.

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?'

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.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works." —Alan J. Perlis

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?

Someone who could get up in the morning, make coffee, choose what to wear, and then go out and cold-bloodedly put a total stranger to death. Did you have to be some kind of anomalous, psychopathic freak to do that? Did you have to be born that way? Or could any woman, correctly programmed, be turned into a professional executioner?

Hopper would later gain fame both as a teacher and as a pioneer in the development of high-level programming languages. Yet perhaps her best-known contribution came in the summer of 1945, when she and her colleagues were tracking down a glitch in the Mark II and discovered a large moth that had gotten crushed by one of the relay switches and shorted it out. She taped the dead moth into the logbook with the notation "First case of an actual bug being found.

computer science is the study of "the phenomena surrounding computers"—all the phenomena,

official programming language was reminiscent of the minis. Created in the spring of 1975 by two young men who had been inspired by the Popular Electronics article—Bill Gates, now a Harvard undergrad, and his high school buddy Paul Allen, a programmer working outside Boston—Altair BASIC took a number of key features from DEC's BASIC for the PDP-11.

Before 1965 was out, GE was offering just such a commercial time-sharing service based on the Dartmouth College system, which included the new interactive programming language BASIC.

Lisp was John McCarthy's invention.

When the systems are truly complex, in short, programming has to be a process of exploration and discovery. That had been the whole point of interactive languages such as Lisp, as well as interactive-design tools such as Sketchpad: they made it easy to explore new solutions by making it easy to formulate and then reformulate ideas on the fly.

When the systems are truly complex, in short, programming has to be a process of exploration and discovery. That had been the whole point of interactive languages such as Lisp, as well as interactive-design tools such as Sketchpad: they made it easy to explore new solutions by making it easy to formulate and then reformulate ideas on the fly. And that was the whole point of Lick's Dynamic Modeling project: he wanted to push exploratory programming as far as he could in every direction.

Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny were starting to plan a campus-wide time-sharing system for much the same reason; the effort would eventually lead them to create an interactive programming language that they would call BASIC.

If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future," he said, "then computation may someday be organized as a public utility, just as the telephone system is a public utility. We can envisage computer service companies whose subscribers are connected to them by telephone lines. Each subscriber needs to pay only for the capacity that he actually uses, but he has access to all programming languages characteristic of a very large system.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

Since he'd based it on an earlier, experimental language by Thompson, code-named "B," Ritchie code-named his language "C.