29 Quotes by David Gelernter

For years, computer scientists were treating operating systems design as sort of an open-reserch issue, when the field’s direction had been decided by commercial operations. Computer science has become completely cut off from reality.

Computers make people stupid.

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

In principle the first thing on the stream would be my birth certificate, a little electronic version of that, my parents would put my school records, health records, whatever of their child onto the stream. And the stream continues to flow forward through time.

The book is a unit and is such a brilliant ergonomic unit.

One: Make Congress and the White House obey the same Obamacare rules you do. Two: Obama let business off for a year; we want workers to be let off for a year too. That’s the GOP plan. What part don’t you like?

The book is a form in which some of the greatest masterpieces that mankind has ever achieved are expressed;.

We still have books because they are so brilliantly suited to the way human beings absorb information and at their best, they are among the most beautiful things we have.

Similarly for marking exercises, quantitative exercises, maybe not so much in mathematics, but certainly problem sets in physics, chemistry, and engineering and things like that where answers and methods are clear cut, absolutely. I would like to see that done online.