Friday, April 19, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

« All quotes from this author
 

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

» Edsger W. Dijkstra - all quotes »



Tags: Edsger W. Dijkstra Quotes, Authors starting by D


Similar quotes

 

Well, I think comparing Common Lisp to Scheme is prima facie evidence of ill will, even if Common Lisp wins. It is somewhat like a supposed compliment like "man, you are even smarter than George W. Bush".

 
Erik Naggum
 

It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to ? or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

 
Richard Feynman
 

By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.

 
Leo Tolstoy
 

Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now."

 
Joel Spolsky
© 2009–2013Quotes Privacy Policy | Contact