Gray Watson's Quote List

Computers

• The irony of the information age is that it lends credibility to uninformed opinion. -- Stephen Coonts??
• Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. -- Eric Raymond from linuxjournal.com.
• [Perl is] a swiss-army gasoline-powered chainsaw -- Geoff Collyer on the Plan9 fan mailing list.
• The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well. -- Phil Wadler, POPL 2003
• Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X" label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network. -- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
• Innovation means nothing if its incomprehensible. -- Scott Raven, Lycos software engineer during an architecture review.
• The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. -- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
• As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
• Win NT, well, I suppose that's better than paying for it. -- Steve O'Hara-Smith
• When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb. -- Steve Haflich (comp.lang.c++)
• The Web isn't better than sex, but sliced bread is in serious trouble. -- unknown
• We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. -- Robert Wilensky
• Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles:
  • Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work.
  • Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't.
  • PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.
  -- Philip Greenspun
• .. the Twentieth Century, the innovative century that brought you WW I, WW II, and WWW. -- Bill Higgins .sig
• Right now, we're all street people on the information highway; we can't protect our privacy and information; we can't prove who we are; we can't buy anything. -- Nathan Myrhvold, senior VP of Advanced Technology at MS
• The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots. -- P. Ginsparg
• Microsoft - We put the "backwards" into backwards compatibility. -- Anonymous sig.
• Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. -- MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab job ad written by Hal Abelson (1992)
• Emacs isn't just a program... it's a way of life. -- Chris Maeda, (May 8, 1991)
• Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX. -- Tom Christaensen
• Not having sendmail is like not having VD. -- R. Heiby .sig
• I just found out that the brain is like a computer. If that's true, then there really aren't any stupid people. Just people running DOS. -- VH1's 'Stand Up Spotlight'
• Windows/NT - From the people who brought you EDLIN. -- rec.humor.funny / yucks volume 3.20
• Ok, so now we're going from the Death Star to the Borg. -- overheard on the net re: Novell's buyout of USL
• In computer science, we stand on each other's feet. -- Brian K. Reid
• Outlawing cryptography is like outlawing pencils because bookies use them to record bets. -- John Perry Barlow, EFF-Austin Cryptography Conference (October 1993)
• The blizzard of anguished ASCII it summoned forth on the Net... -- John Perry Barlow, Re: Clipper/Skipjack announcement (October 1993)
• The speed is a pain, but better than a 1/2 hour drive across Munich. -- Bernhard Schneck, Re: disk NFS-mounted via PPP (1993)
• Our mailing lists (and their repeater newsgroups) are only for the purpose of promoting proprietary software. -- Richard Stallman, (Feb 18, 1992)
• There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. -- Ken Olson, DEC President (1977)

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