3,840 quotes found
“The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.”
“The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.”
“The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.”
“A mathematical formula should never be owned by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.”
“I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.”
“I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.”
“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.”
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterrupti...”
“How can you own [...] numbers? Numbers belong to the world.”
“In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.”
“If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your ti...”
“In a way, you'd say my life is a convex combination of English and mathematics. ... And not only that, I want my kids to be that way: use left brain, right brain at the same time – you got a lot mo...”
“A good technical writer, trying not to be obvious about it, but says everything twice: formally and informally. Or maybe three times.”
“I am assuming that God exists and I am glad that there is no way to prove this. [Because] I would run through the proof once, and then I'd forget it, and I would never speculate about spiritual thi...”
“I came to philosophy finally phrased as 0.8 is enough. … If I had a way to rate happiness, I think it's a good design to have an organism that's happy about 80% of the time. If it was 100% of the t...”
“Let's face it, if there were 10 people like me in the world, we wouldn't have time to read each other's books.”
“Most people only know pi in decimal.”
“By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.”
“An algorithm must be seen to be believed.”
“Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random”
