“The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.”

—  Rick Cook

The Wizardry Consulted (1995)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 6, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program pat…" by Rick Cook?
Rick Cook photo
Rick Cook 18
American writer 1944

Related quotes

Terry Pratchett photo

“My programming language was solder.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

On his early computers, from a talk "When I Were A Lad, We Used To Dream of 64K" at the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland, (August 2005)
General sources

John McCarthy photo

“Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it. If designers and programmers think about the apparent mental qualities that their programs will have, they'll create programs that are easier and pleasanter — more humane — to deal with.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/little.html", Psychology Today, December 1983, pp. 46–49. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351
1980s

Richard Stallman photo

“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 (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

Free Software Is Even More Important Now (September 2013) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html
2010s

“Physicians are the cobblers, rather the botchers, of men's bodies; as the one patches our tattered clothes, so the other solders our diseased flesh.”

John Ford (dramatist) (1586–1639) dramatist

Act I, sc. ii.
The Lover's Melancholy (1628)

Jennifer Beals photo

“Love is the most dangerous thing in the world.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview at PlanetOut.com (2004) http://jennifer-beals.com/media/press/planet_out.html.

Donald Ervin Knuth photo

“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 Ervin Knuth book The Art of Computer Programming

Vol. I Fasc. 1, "MMIX, a RISC computer for the new millennium"
The Art of Computer Programming (1968–2011)

Richard Dawkins photo

“The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 4. The Gene machine

Hirokazu Yasuhara photo

“So I come up with some ideas for the programmer to work with, and they decide what's good and what's impossible to implement, based on schedule or programming difficulty.”

Hirokazu Yasuhara (1965) Japanese video game designer

Gamasutra interview (2008)

“There is a rigorous science, just waiting to be recognized and developed, which encompasses the whole of 'the software problem,' as defined, including the hardware, software, languages, devices, logic, data, knowledge, users, users, and effectiveness, etc. for end-users, providers, enablers, commissioners, and sponsors, alike.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

D.T. Ross (1989) "Appendix B: Understanding: The Key to Software" in: Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council Scaling Up: A Research Agenda for Software Engineering. p. 66 (cited on p. 3).

Daniel T. Gilbert photo

“"Dangerous" does not mean exciting or bold; it means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.”

Daniel T. Gilbert (1957) American psychologist

Daniel T. Gilbert (2007) in: John Brockman. What is your dangerous idea?: today's leading thinkers on the unthinkable. Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 42

Related topics