In speaking English, for example, it would not matter if I put a broad nasal twang on every vowel I uttered, because it does not make any difference to the meaning of what I am saying — it would just sound (to British ears, at any rate) as if I were an American, or had a cold.
Linguistics by David Crystal, 1971
Where computers race for faster calculations, mathematics races for more clever algorithms. An idea that cuts in half the number of steps is as good as a chip that doubles the speed.
Wavelets by Gilbert Strang in American Scientist, 1994 May-June
Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist, so that by sixty-four he had all but given up on making contact with the living, let alone discussing his problems with the dead.
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth, 1995
I hate data structures; people can change them.
Croquet Presentation by Alan Kay at Stanford University, 2003 April 25
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace in The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan, 1968
You know what I called that a long time ago? I called it “object-oriented programming.” Too bad C++ came along.
Croquet Presentation by Alan Kay at Stanford University, 2003 April 25
In a sense, what is being described here is not friendliness to the user, but friendliness to the user’s way of doing work.
Software Engineering Environments by Leon Osterwiel in IEEE Computer, 1981 April
Her real identity was no more my business than it was that of her clients. But almost two years later, I listened again to my tapes. In one section, late in the interview, in a part I hadn’t transcribed because it wasn’t important, she unguardedly said her daughter’s first name.
I got out my files. For some reason, I still had the model releases I had gotten the women to sign for Paolo that night. Jocelynne had signed only her first initial and had scrawled out her real last name in a nearly illegible hand. I could make out the first letter and a few possibilities for the next four. But if the daughter’s first name was real and the Texas A&M story true that might be enough. I went to the Texas A&M web site and began typing in names. Within five minutes, I had found Jocelynne’s daughter. I went to Facebook and there she was. She looked like Jocelynne, the wholesome co-ed version. She looked sweet. She had posted hundreds of pictures of herself, mostly wearing Aggie Sprint wear and posing with an arm around friends. Looking through her friends list, I found her little brother. She had recently written on his wall: “Congrats to my favorite Little League pitcher—you rule little bro!!!” Read More »
I believe progress comes from making our implmentation process and supporting tools so powerful that they will subsume design and analysis, thereby removing from the software construction process the “impedance mismatches” that are so detrimental to the quality of the final product.
The Conceptual Perspective by Bertran Meyer in IEEE Computer, 1996 January
Smoke is how robots express love.
Rapid Prototype Your Life by Bre Pettis at 25th Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin, 2008
As with many other operating system projects, the system we actually constructed disappointed us in several ways. It was larger, slower and considerably more complicated than we expected.
A Postmortem for a Time Sharing System by Howard Sturgis, Xerox PARC Technical Report CSL 74-1, 1974 January
These features make end-user development possible, but we believe they are not enough to make it probable.
ACE: Building Interactive Graphical Applications by Jeff Johnson, Bonnie Nardi, Craig Zarmer and James Miller in Communications of the ACM, April, 1993
Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit into a language. There shouldn’t be one.
Design Principles Behind Smalltalk by Dan Ingalls in Byte, 1981 August
Studying how the various parameters of BitTorrent can be adjusted to improve the overall efficiency, and proposing improvements to the protocol only makes sense if deficiencies of the protocol or significant room for improvements are identified. We decided in this study to make the step before, i.e., to explore how BitTorrent is behaving on real torrents. We found in particular that the last piece problem, which is one of the most studied problem with proposed improvements of BitTorrent is in fact a marginal problem that cannot be observed in our torrent test.
Understanding BitTorrent: An Experimental Perspective by Arnaud Legout, Guillaume Urvoy-Keller and Pietro Michiardi, INRIA Technical Report, 2005 September
For accounting, you only need to be able to add. For finance, you need to be able to understand probability.
What I Know About How You Invest by Terry Odean at Legg Mason Funds Management Investment Conference, 2003 November 7
Select a project as advanced as you can conceive, as ambitious as you can justify, in the hope that routine work can be kept to a minimum; hold out against all pressure to incorporate such system expansions that would only result in a purely quantitative increase of the total amount of work to be done.
The Structure of the “THE”-Multiprogramming System by Edsger Dijkstra in Communications of the ACM, 1968 May
The error of Wilson in Mexico, of Nixon in Vietnam, of our whole quest for “self-determination,” is clear: we have reversed the order of cause and effect. Free elections are created by free men, not vice versa. The machinery of election will not call up, establish, or guarantee political freedom. The belief that it will reveals our trust in “the market,” our belief that competition of itself makes excellence prevail. Our faith in the electoral process is based entirely on myths of the market. We think we can be “open” to all political alternatives (we cannot). We think we welcome all competitors for power (we do not). We think the freedoms we possess were wrought by this process (they were not). We think the process will work automatically for others (it will not). If our freedoms are impaired, we think — as Dr. Wald did — this comes from some failure in the voting process (it does not). And we hope to cure all such discontent by repairing, restoring, or improving the process (we cannot). We think that voting is freedom’s “invisible hand.” Read More »
The issue is design, not programming language.
Why Software Jewels are Rare by David Parnas in IEEE Computer, 1996 February
She nodded. “And what did you learn?”
It was a good question. On day three the cutter had arranged a group rendezvous, where we’d met in the dark nearly a mile from camp and snorted meth that she’d smuggled in the hem of her rain pants. I felt again for a moment the awful burn it produced in the back of my throat, then the exhilarating lift as my skeleton took flight. Of all the discoveries I was supposed to have made, the only one that felt real was that when you lose your identical twin, in a way you become two people.
“I learned how to tie a bowline,” I said.
Mascots by Ted Thompson in Tin House, 2009 Spring
We have no less than 65 implementations of TRUE and FALSE in the tree
[patch 1/1] consolidate TRUE and FALSE from Andrew Morton in the Linux kernel mailing list
