Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
Donald E. Knuth (b. 1938) American computer scientist, mathematician, academic
Essay (1996), “Foreword” to Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger, A = B (1996)
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Quotations about:
programming
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Once the product’s task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.
Jef Raskin (1943-2005) American computer scientist, writer
The Humane Interface, 1-5 (2000)
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Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.
Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they’re much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity.
Eric S. Raymond (b. 1957) American software developer, writer [a.k.a. ESR]
The Cathedral & the Bazaar (1999)
Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
Eric S. Raymond (b. 1957) American software developer, writer [a.k.a. ESR]
The Cathedral and the Bazaar, ch. 2, Rule 9 (1999)
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What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) English author, humorist, screenwriter
Dirk Gently No. 1, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, ch. 4 [Richard] (1987)
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I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) English author, humorist, screenwriter
Last Chance to See, ch. 2 (1991)
There is no doubt that the “grail” of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Donald E. Knuth (b. 1938) American computer scientist, mathematician, academic
Essay (1974-12), “Structured Programming with go to Statements,” ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 6
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