#program

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine. After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation. Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#humor #programming #humor

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it. ↗

— Marvin Minsky

#sicp #imagination

We have a beautiful program which is audacious and I really want us all to roll up our sleeves and to work at making it a success. ↗

— Pauline Marois

#beautiful #i #making #our #program

Social Security is a program that should be strengthened and preserved for future generations. ↗

— Diane Watson

#future generations #generations #preserved #program #security

All of the religions - with the exception of Tibetan Buddhism, which doesn't believe in a heaven - teach that heaven is a better place. At the end of the program, I say that heaven is a place where you are happy. All of the religions have that in common. ↗

— Barbara Walters

#better #better place #buddhism #common #end

I wouldn't just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother's creative solution - to put me in workshops and classes and children's theatre programmes. ↗

— Kerry Washington

#children #classes #come #creative #dramatic

Social Security is a family insurance program, not an investment scheme. ↗

— Diane Watson

#insurance #investment #program #scheme #security

We have an incredible national forest service, and we have an incredible child outreach program that the president has put together. I don't see anything wrong with national service for a minimum of two years. If we were to require that, we wouldn't need a draft. ↗

— Montel Williams

#child #draft #forest #i #incredible

My duty as a teacher is to train, educate future programmers. ↗

— Niklaus Wirth

#educate #future #programmers #teacher #train

I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way. ↗

— Steve Wozniak

#engineering #exceptional #focus #had #head