#programming

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

#computer-science #programming #technology #beauty

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

#inspirational #programming #inspirational

We're not programming to conservatives. We're just not eliminating their point of view. ↗

— Roger Ailes

#eliminating #just #point #point of view #programming

In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages. ↗

— Guido van Rossum

#complex #daily #daily work #distributed #example

Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either. ↗

— Guido van Rossum

#belief #details #easier #either #harder

The second stream of material that is going to come out of this project is a programming environment and a set of programming tools where we really want to focus again on the needs of the newbie. This environment is going to have to be extremely user-friendly. ↗

— Guido van Rossum

#come #environment #extremely #focus #going

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. ↗

— Alan Perlis

#irrelevant #language #level #low #programming

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind. ↗

— Émilie Du Châtelet

#engineering #math #passonate-minds #rights #science

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

#programming #sicp #science

It doesn't matter if you are not 'good' at creative activity. You do not have to be 'good' at pushups before they strengthen your arms. You have to do them to get them to strengthen your arms, and so it is with creative activities: you have to do them to exercise those parts of your brain. Those creative activities that easily integrate with daily life are best because, as with atheltic exercise programs, thoses that intrude on busy schedule are not likely to get done ↗

— Neil Kirby

#business