hackers

Technology at present is covert philosophy; the point is to make it openly philosophical.
  ~ Phil Agre
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Your primary goal is not to solve their problem. Your primary goal is to help them become one notch more capable of solving their problem on their own.
  ~ Phil Agre
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Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The reason that a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Proprietary software is an injustice.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can't change it since they don't have the source code. They can't study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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When I launched the development of the GNU system, I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom, thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom, then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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A smartphone is a computer - it's not built using a computer - the job it does is the job of being a computer. So, everything we say about computers, that the software you run should be free - you should insist on that - applies to smart phones just the same. And likewise to those tablets.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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In the U.S., you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. 'Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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With paper printed books, you have certain freedoms. You can acquire the book anonymously by paying cash, which is the way I always buy books. I never use a credit card. I don't identify to any database when I buy books. Amazon takes away that freedom.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If there is a Like button in a page, Facebook knows who visited that page. And it can get IP address of the computer visiting the page even if the person is not a Facebook user.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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In essence, Chrome OS is the GNU/Linux operating system. However, it is delivered without the usual applications, and rigged up to impede and discourage installing applications.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Officially, MPAA stands for Motion Picture Association of America, but I suggest that MPAA stands for Malicious Power Attacking All.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Also, because schools must teach the spirit of goodwill, the habit of helping others around you, every class should have this rule: students, if you bring software to class you may not keep it for yourself.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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CD stores have the disadvantage of an expensive inventory, but digital bookshops would need no such thing: they could write copies at the time of sale on to memory sticks, and sell you one if you forgot your own.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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In practice, the copyright system does a bad job of supporting authors, aside from the most popular ones. Other authors' principal interest is to be better known, so sharing their work benefits them as well as readers.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend; it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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In essence, Chrome OS is the GNU/Linux operating system. However, it is delivered without the usual applications, and rigged up to impede and discourage installing applications. I'd say the problem is in the nature of the job ChromeOS is designed to do.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. They will not be aware that we have ideas, that a system exists because of ethical ideals, which were omitted from ideas associated with the term 'open source.'
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The world has sprung very nasty threats on us and our software.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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[UCITA] applies to any sort of computer-readable information. Even if you use only free software, you are likely to read articles on your computer, and access databases. UCITA will allow the publishers to impose the most outrageous restrictions on you. They could change the license retroactively at any time, and force you to delete the material if you don't accept the change. They could even prohibit you from describing what you see as flaws in the material.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. 'Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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part of the long-term effort to liberate cyberspace.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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One basis for society is that of helping your neighbor -- but in the software world this is piracy. To prevent this, the U.S. is putting in place practices which are like those in the former Soviet Union -- computerized guards, propaganda in favor of licensing, rewards for informing on co-workers, and penalties which make distributing software as serious a crime as armed robbery.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If you focus your mind on the freedom and community that you can build by staying firm, you will find the strength to do it.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The free world welcomes Sun's decision to use the Free Software Foundation's GPL.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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British book publishers plan to put a microchip into every book to record who owns it - an unprecedented surveillance measure.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I partly agree with the underlying message that people should take charge and solve problems, rather than just cast blame on others.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Accusations against innocent people happen with terrible regularity, and the danger of false convictions is immense.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
The reason that a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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designed to prohibit all free software. It covers only code that implements, precisely, the Microsoft formats, which means that a program under this license does not permit modification.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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We've partly removed the inconveniences of preventing a user from combining code from various free software packages.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I found it tremendously humiliating to be there because most of the kids there were brain dead or psychotic.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I founded the free software movement, a movement for freedom to cooperate. Open source was a reaction against our idealism. We are still here and the open-source people have not wiped us out.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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H.R. 354 would effectively allow facts to become private property, simply through their inclusion in an electronic database. Ominously, many collections of public records, maintained by companies on contracts to governments, would become property of those companies.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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By the way, I hope you all know about the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola company for things like murdering union organizers in Colombia. See the site killercoke.org.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users dont have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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It doesn't take special talents to reproduce--even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Snow is so beautiful, it doesn't have to be useful.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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There is no system but GNU and Linux is one of it's kernels
  ~ Richard Stallman
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My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I've read that male dolphins try to have sex with humans, and female apes solicit sex from humans. What is wrong with giving them what they want, if that's what turns you on, or even just to gratify them?
  ~ Richard Stallman
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For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I'm always happy when I'm protesting.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I'm the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance in technology is an opening for them to further restrict its users.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do,
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. 'Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Laws that oppress people have no moral authority
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know...
  ~ Richard Stallman
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We need to teach people to refuse to install non-free plug-ins; we need to teach people to care more about their long-term interest of freedom than their immediate desire to view a particular site.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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In terms of effect on the world, it's very good that I've lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn't do it. But I sure wish I hadn't had so much pain.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Our mailing lists (and their repeater newsgroups) are only for the purpose of promoting proprietary software.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I don’t have a problem with someone using their talents to become successful, I just don’t think the highest calling is success. Things like freedom and the expansion of knowledge are beyond success, beyond the personal. Personal success is not wrong, but it is limited in importance, and once you have enough of it it is a shame to keep striving for that, instead of for truth, beauty, or justice.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness
 ~not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean "security breaker."
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad… DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it. Meeting that sad animal is not an agreeable surprise.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Globalizing a bad thing makes it worse. But globalizing a good thing is usually good.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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So, make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans. Because if you do that, then people with the money will dictate what you do with your life.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source".
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute.
  ~ Richard Stallman
%
If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about 'open source' thinking that I work under that banner.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. And in the area of computing, freedom means not using proprietary software.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Would a dating service on the net be 'frowned upon' . . . ? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world's larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Think 'free speech,' not 'free beer.'
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers feelings.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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It's clear that other problems such as [...] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Also, because schools must teach the spirit of goodwill, the habit of helping others around you, every class should have this rule: students, if you bring software to class you may not keep it for yourself.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Sharing knowledge is the most fundamental act of friendship. Because it is a way you can give something without loosing something.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might prefer to ignore, such as whether their conduct is ethical. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may simply close their minds to it. It does not follow that we ought to stop talking about these things.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!
  ~ Richard Stallman
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A commune is where people join together to share their lack of wealth.
  ~ Richard Stallman
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I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy's comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we'd have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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The basic idea in case-based, or CBR, is that the program has stored problems and solutions. Then, when a new problem comes up, the program tries to find a similar problem in its database by finding analogous aspects between the problems.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn't know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise.
  ~ Marvin Minsky
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People also underestimate the time they spend debugging. They underestimate how much time they can spend chasing a long bug. With testing, I know straight away when I added a bug. That lets me fix the bug immediately, before it can crawl off and hide. There are few things more frustrating or time wasting than debugging. Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot quicker if we just didn't create the bugs in the first place?
~ Martin Fowler (2002) as cited in Evolutionary Design: A Conversation with Martin Fowler, Part III by Bill Venners, November 18, 2002.
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Transparency is valuable, but while many things can be made transparent in distributed objects, performance isn't usually one of them.
~ Martin Fowler (2003) in: Software development. Vol. 11. p. 99
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Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a 'refactoring') does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it's less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.
~ Martin Fowler at refactoring.com as cited in: Lawrence Bernstein, C. M. Yuhas (2005) Trustworthy Systems Through Quantitative Software Engineering. p. 266
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One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase.
~ Martin Fowler as cited in: James Shore, Shane Warden (2007) The Art of Agile Development. p. 319
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Often designers do complicated things that improve the capacity on a particular hardware platform when it might actually be cheaper to buy more hardware.
~ Martin Fowler (2012) Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
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Modeling Principle: Models are not right or wrong; they are more or less useful.
~ Martin Fowler
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It is commonly said that a pattern, however it is written, has four essential parts: a statement of the context where the pattern is useful, the problem that the pattern addresses, the forces that play in forming a solution, and the solution that resolves those forces. … it supports the definition of a pattern as "a solution to a problem in a context", a definition that [unfortunately] fixes the bounds of the pattern to a single problem-solution pair
~ Martin Fowler
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The definition I use for pattern is an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others
~ Martin Fowler
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The second problem [with using UML for the purposes of this book] is that the Unified Modeling Language concentrates on implementation modeling rather than conceptual modeling
~ Martin Fowler
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When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.
~ Martin Fowler
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Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
~ Martin Fowler
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Refactoring (noun) : a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing the observable behavior of the software. To refactor (verb) : to restructure software by applying a series of refactorings without changing the observable behavior of the software.
~ Martin Fowler
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Often you'll see the same three or four data items together in lots of places: fields in a couple of classes, parameters in many method signatures. Bunches of data that hang around together really ought to be made into their own object.
~ Martin Fowler
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When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.
~ Martin Fowler
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The key is to test the areas that you are most worried about going wrong. That way you get the most benefit for your testing effort. It is better to write and run incomplete tests than not to run complete tests
~ Martin Fowler
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Steve Mellor and I independently came up with a characterization of the three modes in which people use the UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language. By far the most common of the three, at least to my biased eye, is UML as sketch. In this usage, developers use the UML to help communicate some aspects of a system. As with blueprints, you can use sketches in a forward-engineering or reverse-engineering direction. Forward engineering draws a UML diagram before you write code, while reverse engineering builds a UML diagram from existing code in order to help understand it.
~ Martin Fowler
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The key books about object-oriented graphical modeling languages appeared between 1988 and 1992. Leading figures included Grady Booch [Booch,OOAD]; Peter Coad [Coad, OOA], [Coad, OOD]; Ivar Jacobson (Objectory) [Jacobson, OOSE]; Jim Odell [Odell]; Jim Rumbaugh (OMT) [Rumbaugh, insights], [Rumbaugh, OMT]; Sally Shlaer and Steve Mellor [Shlaer and Mellor, data], [Shlaer and Mellor, states] ; and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (Responsibility Driven Design) [Wirfs-Brock].
~ Martin Fowler
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Graphical design notations have been with us for a while... their primary value is in communication and understanding. A good diagram can often help communicate ideas about a design, particularly when you want to avoid a lot of details. Diagrams can also help you understand either a software system or a business process. As part of a team trying to figure out something, diagrams both help understanding and communicate that understanding throughout a team. Although they aren't, at least yet, a replacement for textual programming languages, they are a helpful assistant... Of these graphical notations, the UML's importance comes from its wide use and standardization within the OO development community. The UML has become not only the dominant graphical notation within the OO world but also a popular technique in non-OO circles.
~ Martin Fowler
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Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility
~ Martin Fowler
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For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and ... our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Another two years later, in 1957, I married and Dutch marriage rites require you to state your profession and I stated that I was a programmer. But the municipal authorities of the town of Amsterdam did not accept it on the grounds that there was no such profession. And, believe it or not, but under the heading "profession" my marriage act shows the ridiculous entry "theoretical physicist"!
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Automatic computers have now been with us for a quarter of a century. They have had a great impact on our society in their capacity of tools, but in that capacity their influence will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture, compared with the much more profound influence they will have in their capacity of intellectual challenge without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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After having programmed for some three years, I had a discussion with A. van Wijngaarden, who was then my boss at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, a discussion for which I shall remain grateful to him as long as I live. The point was that I was supposed to study theoretical physics at the University of Leiden simultaneously, and as I found the two activities harder and harder to combine, I had to make up my mind, either to stop programming and become a real, respectable theoretical physicist, or to carry my study of physics to a formal completion only, with a minimum of effort, and to become....., yes what? A programmer? But was that a respectable profession? For after all, what was programming? Where was the sound body of knowledge that could support it as an intellectually respectable discipline? I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware colleagues, who, when asked about their professional competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed. Full of misgivings I knocked on van Wijngaarden’s office door, asking him whether I could "speak to him for a moment"; when I left his office a number of hours later, I was another person. For after having listened to my problems patiently, he agreed that up till that moment there was not much of a programming discipline, but then he went on to explain quietly that automatic computers were here to stay, that we were just at the beginning and could not I be one of the persons called to make programming a respectable discipline in the years to come? This was a turning point in my life and I completed my study of physics formally as quickly as I could. One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for "the average programmer"
 ~ you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distributed' or 'higher-order' or 'applicative' and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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For me, the first challenge for computing science is to discover how to maintain order in a finite, but very large, discrete universe that is intricately intertwined. And a second, but not less important challenge is how to mould what you have achieved in solving the first problem, into a teachable discipline: it does not suffice to hone your own intellect (that will join you in your grave), you must teach others how to hone theirs. The more you concentrate on these two challenges, the clearer you will see that they are only two sides of the same coin: teaching yourself is discovering what is teachable.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952, and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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We must not forget that it is not our [computing scientists'] business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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The major cause [of the software crisis] is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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LISP has been jokingly described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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We can found no scientific discipline, nor a hearty profession, on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and, mainly, one computer manufacturer.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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[Though computer science is a fairly new discipline, it is predominantly based on the Cartesian world view. As Edsgar W. Dijkstra has pointed out]
A scientific discipline emerges with the - usually rather slow! - discovery of which aspects can be meaningfully 'studied in isolation for the sake of their own consistency.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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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
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I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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(Refering to his conclusion to the Barber paradox or Russell's paradox.)
Probably I am very naive, but I also think I prefer to remain so, at least for the time being and perhaps for the rest of my life.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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A confusion of even longer standing came from the fact that the unprepared included the electronic engineers that were supposed to design, build and maintain the machines. The job was actually beyond the electronic technology of the day, and, as a result, the question of how to get and keep the physical equipment more or less in working condition became in the early days the all-overriding concern. As a result, the topic became – primarily in the USA – prematurely known as ‘computer science’ – which, actually, is like referring to surgery as ‘knife science’ – and it was firmly implanted in people’s minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment. Quod non [Latin: "Which is not true"]. We now know that electronic technology has no more to contribute to computing than the physical equipment. We now know that programmable computer is no more and no less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism without changing a single wire, and that the core challenge for computing science is hence a conceptual one, viz., what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. (...) Software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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When I came back from Munich, it was September, and I was Professor of Mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Later I learned that I had been the Department's third choice, after two numerical analysts had turned the invitation down; the decision to invite me had not been an easy one, on the one hand because I had not really studied mathematics, and on the other hand because of my sandals, my beard and my "arrogance" (whatever that may be).
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote "teamwork". For its anti-individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit". Very.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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It is time to unmask the computing community as a Secret Society for the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees. Hence industry rejects any methodological proposal that can be viewed as making intellectual demands on its work force. Since in the US the influence of industry is more pervasive than elsewhere, the above dogma hurts American computing science most. The moral of this sad part of the story is that as long as computing science is not allowed to save the computer industry, we had better see to it that the computer industry does not kill computing science.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (from one cast). In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page. In one place he did this nine times. When they peeled them, the last version proved identical to the first one.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in ’59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame.
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy......
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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This is generally true: any sizeable piece of program, or even a complete program package, is only a useful tool that can be used in a reliable fashion, provided that the documentation pertinent for the user is much shorter than the program text. If any machine or system requires a very thick manual, its usefulness becomes for that very circumstance subject to doubt!
~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
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An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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Right now, computers, which are supposed to be our servant, are oppressing us.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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Users do not care about what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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The system should treat all user input as sacred.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.
 ~ Jef Raskin
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In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.
~ Ken Thompson
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If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
~ Ken Thompson
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In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
~ Ken Thompson
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One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.
~ Ken Thompson
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It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.
~ Ken Thompson
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No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
~ Ken Thompson
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You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
~ Ken Thompson
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I am a very bottom-up thinker.
~ Ken Thompson
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The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
~ Ken Thompson
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I am a programmer.
~ Ken Thompson
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When in doubt, use brute force.
~ Ken Thompson
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A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
~ Ken Thompson
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Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.
~ Ken Thompson
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I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.
~ Ken Thompson
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I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.
~ Ken Thompson
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I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.
~ Ken Thompson
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I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
~ Ken Thompson
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I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.
~ Ken Thompson
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I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.
~ Ken Thompson
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I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
~ Ken Thompson
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It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.
~ Ken Thompson
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On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
~ Ken Thompson
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One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.
~ Ken Thompson
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So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.
~ Ken Thompson
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That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
~ Ken Thompson
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The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.
~ Ken Thompson
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There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.
~ Ken Thompson
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There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.
~ Ken Thompson
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Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.
~ Ken Thompson
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We have persistant objects, they're called files.
~ Ken Thompson
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We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.
~ Ken Thompson
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C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
~ Dennis Ritchie
%
C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.
~ Dennis Ritchie
%
The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.
~ Dennis Ritchie
%
Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.
~ Dennis Ritchie
%
A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?
~ Dennis Ritchie
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At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.
~ Dennis Ritchie
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Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.
~ Rob Pike
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Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C.
~ Rob Pike
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Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages.
~ Rob Pike
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When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified.
~ Rob Pike
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To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.
~ Rob Pike
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You have to make a decision whether it's a new product or you integrate it with an existing product. It takes time to work these things out.
~ Rob Pike
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Dynamic typing is not necessarily good. You get static errors at run time, which you really should be able to catch at compile time.
~ Rob Pike
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We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better.
~ Rob Pike
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The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.
~ Rob Pike
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We don't believe we've solved the multicore-programming problem. But we think we've built an environment in which a certain class of problems can take advantage of the multicore architecture.
~ Rob Pike
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Even though most people won't be directly involved with programming, everyone is affected by computers, so an educated person should have a good understanding of how computer hardware, software, and networks operate.
~ Brian Kernighan
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Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do.
~ Brian Kernighan
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I really enjoyed Princeton as a graduate student.
~ Brian Kernighan
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Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
If you don't understand viruses, phishing, and similar threats, you become more susceptible to them. If you don't know how social networks leak information that you thought was private, you're likely to reveal much more than you realize.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.
~ Brian Kernighan
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Bell Labs was an astonishing place for many decades, though it fell on somewhat hard times during the telecom meltdown some years ago, as its corporate owner had to cope with shrinking markets.
~ Brian Kernighan
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I had spent the summer of 1966 working at MIT in the group that was the MIT component of the Multics effort.
~ Brian Kernighan
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Anytime you want to hear about graph partitioning, I will be glad to tell you what I know about graph partitioning. It remains a standard problem. I think it's an interesting problem, because it shows up in a variety of guises in real life.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
No matter how non-technical your life and work, you're going to have to interact with technology and technical people. If you know something about how devices and systems operate, it's a big advantage.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
Computers and computing are all around us. Some computing is highly visible, like your laptop. But this is only part of a computing iceberg. A lot more lies hidden below the surface. We don't see and usually don't think about the computers inside appliances, cars, airplanes, cameras, smartphones, GPS navigators and games.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
Technology is mostly a force for good, but it has its downsides, too. I want my students - and my readers - to be intelligently skeptical about technology and be informed about the good and the not-so-good parts.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
For better or worse, the people who become leaders and decision makers in politics, law and business are going to come from schools like Princeton.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code and rewrite it and see it used and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose.
~ Brian Kernighan
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I want students to understand specific technologies, but the real goal is that they should be able to reason about how systems work and be intelligently skeptical about technology so that, when they're running the world in a few years, they'll do a good job.
~ Brian Kernighan
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It's important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers.
~ Brian Kernighan
%
Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
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The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
Clearly, I reject the view that there is one way that is right for everyone and for every problem.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
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People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
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It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
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Certainly not every good program is object-oriented, and not every object-oriented program is good.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
Defining OO as based on the use of class hierarchies and virtual functions is also practical in that it provides some guidance as to where OO is likely to be successful.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
First, I'd like to see the basic tools such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, database interfaces, GUI builders, CAD tools, and so forth fully support the ISO standard.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
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My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
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I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
With the increasing importance of standards for system-level objects such as COM and CORBA, it is particularly important that the C++ bindings to those be clean, well documented, and simple to use.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
%
Personally, I look forward to better tools for analyzing C++ source code.
~ Bjarne Stroustrup
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Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.
 ~ Alan Kay
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
 ~ Alan Kay
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
 ~ Alan Kay
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
 ~ Alan Kay
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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
 ~ Alan Kay
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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.
 ~ Alan Kay
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
 ~ Alan Kay
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Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'
 ~ Alan Kay
%
When I first got to Apple, which was in '84, the Mac was already out, and 'Newsweek' contacted me and asked me what I thought of the Mac. I said, 'Well, the Mac is the first personal computer good enough to be criticized.'
 ~ Alan Kay
%
Steve was perfectly aware of the Dynabook. That was one of the reasons he wanted me to come to Apple.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
Context is worth 80 IQ points.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent 'agriculture,' we could put the world back together and all would prosper.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
Because people don't understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that 'Guitar Hero' is the same as a real guitar.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
In the old days, you would chastise people for reinventing the wheel. Now we beg, 'Oh, please, please reinvent the wheel.'
 ~ Alan Kay
%
It's hard to change information in books, but if we have everything online, then a somewhat untrustworthy group of people controlling the thing - which I think is what we have - gives us '1984.'
 ~ Alan Kay
%
In the commercial world, you have this problem that the amount of research you can do in a company is based on how well your current business is going, whereas there actually should be an inverse relationship: when things are going worse, you should do more research.
 ~ Alan Kay
%
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
~ Donald Knuth
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People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.
~ Donald Knuth
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Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
~ Donald Knuth
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A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
~ Donald Knuth
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Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
~ Donald Knuth
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People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
~ Donald Knuth
%
God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
~ Donald Knuth
%
The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
~ Donald Knuth
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An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
~ Donald Knuth
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If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
~ Donald Knuth
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Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
~ Donald Knuth
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The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.
~ Donald Knuth
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In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.
~ Donald Knuth
%
I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.
~ Donald Knuth
%
The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.
~ Donald Knuth
%
The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.
~ Donald Knuth
%
There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
~ Donald Knuth
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I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.
~ Donald Knuth
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I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
~ Donald Knuth
%
My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.
~ Donald Knuth
%
I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.
~ Donald Knuth
%
"The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing."
 ~ Doug Engelbart
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"Technology should not aim to replace humans, rather amplify human capabilities."
 ~ Doug Engelbart
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"If ease of use was the only requirement, everybody would still be riding tricycles"
 ~ Doug Engelbart
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"In 20 or 30 years, you’ll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world."
 ~ Doug Engelbart
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"The key thing about all the world’s big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don’t get collectively smarter, we’re doomed."
 ~ Doug Engelbart, 2006
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"Human beings face ever more complex and urgent problems, and their effectiveness in dealing with these problems is a matter that is critical to the stability and continued progress of society."
 ~ Doug Engelbart, 1961
%
Why waste time doing experiments in the organization with technologies that are going to be out of date in 5 years or 10 years?
 ~ Doug Engelbart
%
"There’s a double pressure on the evolution of every organization: how you evolve to be more capable and effective, and efficient, but also how you stay in synch with the rest of the environment."
 ~ Doug Engelbart
%
"The complexity of the problems facing mankind is growing faster than our ability to solve them"
 ~ Doug Engelbart
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"To improve our collective ability to solve the world’s problems, we must harness the immense promise and power of technology."
 ~ Doug Engelbart
%
"The mouse was just a tiny piece of a much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect."
 ~ Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse
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"Any possibility for improving the effective utilization of the intellectual power of society’s problem solvers warrants the most serious consideration. This is because man’s problem-solving capability represents possibly the most important resource possessed by a society. The other contenders for first importance are all critically dependent for their development and use upon this resource."
 ~ Doug Engelbart
%
"If the dream of improving human destiny isn’t enough, how about the thought that the companies that adopt the best Collective IQ improvement strategy will have a significant competitive advantage. Wouldn’t you want your group to have the highest Collective IQ?"
 ~ Doug Engelbart
%
"Payoff will come when we make better use of computers to bring communities of people together and to augment the very human skills that people bring to bear on difficult problems."
 ~ Doug Engelbart
%
"People have got to become more effective at handling complex problems – at their daily struggle with complex and urgent issues. The survival of man seems dependent upon it. Any reasonable possibility seen by society for increasing that effectiveness should warrant serious investigation."
 ~ Doug Engelbart (1968)
%
"The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate"
 ~ Doug Engelbart
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"How do you harness the collective intelligence of the world to solve urgent global problems? That’s what Doug [Engelbart] was about."
 ~ Adam Cheyer
%
"I don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug [Engelbart]’s ideas."
 ~ Alan Kay
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"Engelbart’s vision was [to] multiply the power of people and collaborators by creating systems that augment our intellect, humanity and creativity. His goal was to raise the human potential."
 ~ Samim Winiger & Roelof Pieters
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"Engelbart has forever changed the way we do business in America."
 ~ Coors American Ingenuity Award, 1991
%
"Engelbart did not think of the computer as merely improving human thinking, but as transforming the processes of our institutions in a more profound way…"
 ~ Janet H. Murray, "Inventing the Medium"
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"Work he did 25 years ago is still at the cutting edge . . . and his organizational ideas are at least as profound."
 ~ Alan Kay
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"The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.."
 ~  Daniel J. Boorstin
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"To remain indifferent to the challenges we face is indefensible. If the goal is noble, whether or not it is realized within our lifetime is largely irrelevant. What we must do therefore is to strive and persevere and never give up."
 ~ Dalai Lama XIV
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"We need to train people in an entirely new set of 21st Century skills, which are in fact the oldest skills: communication, collaboration, empathy, respect and how to overcome cultural boundaries."
 ~ Toomas Hendrick Ilves, the fourth President of Estonia
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"Our age of anxiety is the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools"
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
 ~  Albert Einstein
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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
 ~ Margaret Mead (see Source)
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"Perhaps the most basic challenge humanity faces is to awaken our capacity for collective knowing and conscious action so that we can respond successfully to the immense social and ecological difficulties that now confront us."
 ~ Duane Elgin, Author, Educator, Consultant
%
"One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done."
 ~ Marie Curie
%
Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
~ Clifford Stoll
%
Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.
~ Clifford Stoll
%
If you don't have an E-mail address, you're in the Netherworld. If you don't have your own World Wide Web page, you're a nobody.
~ Clifford Stoll
%
Computers in classrooms are the filmstrips of the 1990s.
~ Clifford Stoll
%
The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity.
~ Clifford Stoll
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When I'm online, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.
~ Clifford Stoll
%
Rather than bringing me closer to others, the time that I spend online isolates me from the most important people in my life, my family, my friends, my neighbourhood, my community.
~ Clifford Stoll
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While I admire the insights of many of the people in the world of computing, I get this cold feeling that I speak a different language.
~ Clifford Stoll
%
Merely that I have a World Wide Web page does not give me any power, any abilities, nor any status in the real world.
~ Clifford Stoll
%
"The astronomer's rule of thumb: if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen"
~ Clifford Stoll
%
Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?
~ Clifford Stoll
%
[Martha said] "So what? Somebody's always had control over information, and others have always tried to steal it. Read Machiavelli. As technology changes, sneakiness finds new expressions."
- Clifford Stoll
%
Computers force us into creating with our minds and prevent us from making things with our hands. They dull the skills we use in everyday life.
~ Clifford Stoll
%
We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
~ Dave Clark
%
The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.
- Roy Carlson
%
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
- Edward V Berard
%
If carpenters made buildings the way programmers make programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy all of civilization.
- Gerald Weinberg
%
The act of describing a program in unambiguous detail and the act of programming are one and the same.
- Kevlin Henney
%
Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
- Fred Brooks
%
A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will be able to express themselves clearly in comments.
- Kevlin Henney
%
Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
- Linus Torvalds
%
Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime.
- David Leinweber
%
Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer.
- Filipe Fortes
%