113 Quotes About Computer-science

We can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

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.

Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.Some, downright weird.But then again, you’d have to be.To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.

The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.

...if you aren't, at any given time, scandalized by code you wrote five or even three years ago, you're not learning anywhere near enough

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

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.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meantto be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soapbubble?