Browsing Topic Best Computer Science Quotes

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

Computer science really involves the same mindset, particularly artificial intelligence.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

Drs. Margolis and Fisher have done a great service to education, computer science, and the culture at large. Unlocking the Clubhouse should be required reading for anyone and everyone who is concerned about the decreasing rate of women studying computer science.

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.

I considered law and math. My Dad was a lawyer. I think though I would have ended up in physics if I didn’t end up in computer science.

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

Computer science … jobs should be way more interesting than even going to Wall Street or being a lawyer–or, I can argue, than anything but perhaps biology, and there it’s just a tie.

If somebody is working on a new medicine, computer science helps us model those things. We have a whole group here in Seattle called the Institute for Disease Modelling that is a mix of computer science and math-type people, and the progress we’re making in polio or plans for malaria or really driven by their deep insights.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

I don’t know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

You know that Estonia, based largely on how successful Skype was, built by Estonian developers, that was a tenth of the entire country’s GDP when eBay bought it. That was like a decade ago, it was f****** Estonia, they were behind the Iron Curtain two decades earlier. They’re now pushing for K-12 education in computer science in public schools. They’ve gotten the message. They know how much value that can bring.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

Computer science needs to be part of the core curriculum – like algebra, biology, physics, or chemistry. We need all schools to teach it, not just 10%.

In computer science, we stand on each other’s feet.

There’s an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Until Systers came into existence, the notion of a global community of women in computer science did not exist.

I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

The first law of computer science: Every problem is solved by yet another indirection.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

Computer Science is a science of abstraction -creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.

All problems in Computer Science can be solved by another level of indirection.

The training one receives when one becomes a technician, like a data scientist – we get trained in mathematics or computer science or statistics – is entirely separated from a discussion of ethics.

Only in high school when I began programming computers, did I become interested in tech and start-ups, which led me to attend Stanford and major in Computer Science.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

The issues involved are sufficiently important that courses are now moving out of the philosophy departments and into mainstream computer science. And they affect everyone. Many of the students attracted to these courses are not technology majors, and many of the topics we discuss relate to ethical challenges that transcend the computer world.

On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Starting early and getting girls on computers, tinkering and playing with technology, games and new tools, is extremely important for bridging the gender divide that exists now in computer science and in technology.

Both women and computer science are the losers when a geeky stereotype serves as an unnecessary gatekeeper to the profession.