Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
The difference between theory and practice is smaller in theory than in practice.
Anonymous
Purely applicative languages are poorly applicable.
Alan J. Perlis
Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The use of a program to prove the 4-color theorem will not change mathematics - it merely demonstrates that the theorem, a challenge for a century, is probably not important to mathematics.
Alan J. Perlis
As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such thing as a free variable."
Alan J. Perlis
How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
Edsger W. Dijkstra
I think there's a world market for about five computers.
Thomas J Watson Senior, 1945
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft...and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
Wernher von Braun
If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?
Alan J. Perlis
The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
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