Quotes about program
page 6

“The wonderful thing about dynamic typing is it lets you express anything that is computable. And type systems don’t — type systems are typically decidable, and they restrict you to a subset. People who favor static type systems say “it’s fine, it’s good enough; all the interesting programs you want to write will work as types”. But that’s ridiculous — once you have a type system, you don’t even know what interesting programs are there.”

Gilad Bracha American software engineer

Software Engineering Radio Episode 140: Newspeak and Pluggable Types with Gilad Bracha http://www.se-radio.net/2009/07/episode-140-newspeak-and-pluggable-types-with-gilad-bracha/

People

“All programs in the future will be written in a way that there is no single point of failure. There's no one server that can die and take down the service.”

Ray Ozzie (1955) American businessman

Ray Ozzie's view from the clouds http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10400244-56.html in CNET (18 November 2009).

Way, Failure, Future

“Nudity is available online and on certain TV programs like live fashion shows. It should be in sync with the rules followed in films. There should be one policy for nudity.”

Pahlaj Nihalani

On nudity on the internet and television, as quoted in " Censor board chief Pahlaj Nihalani: Time to snip nudity on TV, web http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tv/news/hindi/Censor-board-chief-Pahlaj-Nihalani-Time-to-snip-nudity-on-TV-web/articleshow/45997678.cms" The Times of India (24 January 2015)

Fashion

“All such problems can be formulated as mathematical programming problems. Naturally, we can propose many sophisticated algorithms and a theory but the final test of a theory is its capacity to solve the problems which originated it.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Source: Linear programming and extensions (1963), p. vii.

Mathematics, Nature, Problem

“There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Interview (10 February 1999) in the video production Take It To The Limits: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl_qwo2VIlU.

“Like it or not, the modern marvel that was South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the handiwork of the black nationalist movement now dismantling it; but the creation of those persecuted, pale, patriarchal Protestants.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Erasing The Afrikaner Nation," http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=58 WorldNetDaily.com, November 23, 2007. 2000s, 2007

“The precision provided (or enforced) by programming languages and their execution can identify lacunas, ambiguities, and other areas of potential confusion in conventional [mathematical] notation.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

Source: Math for the Layman (1999), Ch. 10, §D

Mathematics

“Why have the leaders of the most powerful country on the African continent (Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma) succored the leader of the most corrupt (Mugabe)? These South African strongmen were, in a manner, saluting the Alpha Male Mugabe by implementing a slow-motion version of his program. When he socked it to the whites, Mugabe cemented his status as hero to black activists and their sycophants across South Africa.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Why All Three South-African Presidents Supported Robert Mugabe https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2017/11/30/why-all-three-southafrican-presidents-supported-robert-mugabe-n2416210," Townhall.com, November 30, 2017 2010s, 2017

Country

“You can't save free markets by socialism, I don't know where this idea ever came from. You save free markets by promoting free markets and sound money and balanced budgets. The whole reason why nobody wants to address the real problem is, we're spending a trillion dollars a year overseas running an empire, and it's coming to an end. This country is bankrupt, and we won't admit it. Eventually though, the dollar will go bust, and we will bring our troops home, and we will live within our means, but we ought to do it sensibly, rather than waiting for the collapse of the dollar, and this is what we're doing, we're on the verge of destroying our dollar. And then, you think we have problems now, problems then will be a lot worse, it'd look like the Weimar Republic, or a third world nation. And a lot of people know that, and they're scared to death, but we don't need to be making the problem worse by just propping up everything with more government programs, more inflation, and more helicopters, it won't work.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Fox Business Network, October 14, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qzUtPq8pLE 2000s, 2006-2009

Death, Money, People, World

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive. An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Life, World, Fear, Beauty

“The world contained in a seed is determined by its program.”

Dejan Stojanovic book Circling: 1978-1987

“Blooming,” p. 35
Circling: 1978-1987 (1993), Sequence: “A Conversations with Atoms”

World

“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 (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1988) " On the cruelty of really teaching computing science http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html (EWD1036). 1980s

Science

“Some atheists say that Adam could never name all of those animals in one day. When I get all excited I can speak 350 words in a minute. At 300 words in a minute you can name all the animals in 26 minutes. Dog, cat, elephant, aardvark, hamster, etc. Plus you have got to figure that Adam had an extremely high IQ. He came straight from the hand of God, fully programmed. Did you know that he could speak every language in the world? Okay, there was only one language then. The guy could walk, talk, and name all the animals and get married the first day. Adam probably had a super high IQ. No problem for him to name all the animals in a half hour.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

God, World, Dogs, Guy

“I saw Amadeus when I was nine years old and fell in love with Mozart. The part of Mozart's Requiem called "Lacrymosa" is my favorite piece of music ever. I always wished we could cover it, but with programming and guitars and make it cool. It's our moment to try all the things I wanted to and couldn't, so I started messing with it in Protools. Terry wrote some riffs and turned it into this awesome metal epic.”

Amy Lee (1981) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Explaining her song "Lacrymosa", in "Evanescence: Amy Lee Explains the New Songs" at VH1 News (18 September 2006)

Love, Music, Parting

“The world is filled with millions of 17, 19 and 21 year olds with the necessary programming skills, no day job yet, and a passion to create. Think of the Internet as the great egalitarian environment where multi-billion dollar conglomerates are regularly out-maneuvered by the efforts of individuals.”

Richard Menta American journalist

Source MP3: You Can't Catch Me http://web.archive.org/web/20031217084752/www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2000/catch.html - 6/16/2000 Quotes from the MP3 Newswire

World, Thinking, Effort, Passion

“The fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U. S. A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 138

People, Nature

“Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message to linux-kernel mailing list, 2004-10-26, Torvalds, Linus, 2017-04-25 http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0410.3/1101.html, 2000s, 2000-04

“Although mathematical notation undoubtedly possesses parsing rules, they are rather loose, sometimes contradictory, and seldom clearly stated. […] The proliferation of programming languages shows no more uniformity than mathematics. Nevertheless, programming languages do bring a different perspective. […] Because of their application to a broad range of topics, their strict grammar, and their strict interpretation, programming languages can provide new insights into mathematical notation.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

Source: Math for the Layman (1999), Ch. 10, §D

Mathematics

“Since 1954, the raw speed of computers, as measured by the time it takes to do an addition, increased by a factor of 10,000. That means an algorithm that once took 10 minutes to perform can now be done 15 times a second. Students sometimes ask my advice on how to get rich. The best advice I can give them is to dig up some old algorithm that once took forever, program it for a modern workstation, form a startup to market it and then get rich.”

Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) British computer scientist

"A Half Century of Surprises", in Talking Back to the Machine: Computers and Human Aspiration‎, Ed. Peter J. Denning, Springer, 1999, ISBN 0387984135, p. 112

Time, Speed

“Today’s HUD head Henry Cisneros, whom Kemp praised and endorsed in Senate confirmation hearings in 1993, has used this program to great effect in Baltimore and Dallas, threatening to wreck whole suburbs with an immigration of crime and poverty.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Jack Kemp, American Socialist" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, September 1996, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1996sep-00001,

“In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.”

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

Program Development by Stepwise Refinement (1971)

World

“The capacity to distinguish between empirical knowledge and value-judgments, and the fulfillment of the scientific duty to see the factual truth as well as the practical duty to stand up for our own ideals constitute the program to which we wish to adhere with ever increasing firmness.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy” (1904)

Truth, Knowledge

“In my experience one of the most common causes for programs, products, and change initiatives that don't work is that the wrong question has been asked.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

Question, Change

“Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 32 (p. 397).

Nature

“We don't allow any prick teasing bimbos on our program. If they don't put out they're thrown out of the van at sixty miles an hour. And they can turn some tricks at the truck stop. That's the best place to find wimmen and that's the best place to leave wimmen.”

Steve Broy (1958) American musician

El Duce, The Man, The Myth, The Video (1993) by Reverend Cuntbag

“…what I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It's a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It's not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don't elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

From an interview about religion in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008).

War, People, Family, Religion

“I accept responsibility for the camps, but as far as measures against the Jews, I had nothing to do with them. Those orders came from the RSHA. Himmler sent orders to Kaltenbrunner, who transmitted them to Mueller of the Gestapo, and the latter had the entire extermination program under him. That was the way all of Himmler's orders went. I did not participate in the murder of the Jews.”

Oswald Pohl (1892–1951) Head of the SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt

To Leon Goldensohn, June 5, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
"The Nuremberg Interviews"

Way

“So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

-- Wed, 23 Jan 2008 -- http://web.archive.org/20080213164251/kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/1/23/595619
Attributed

Change, Parting

“Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Interview with Glenn Greenwald, 6 June 2013, Part 1

History

“My generation comes from a world that has been molded by crass TV programs, movies, comic books, popular music, advertisements and commercials. My brain is a huge garbage dump of all this stuff and it is this, mainly, that my work comes out of, for better or for worse. I hope that whatever synthesis I make of all this crap contains something worthwhile, that it's something other than just more smarmy entertainment—or at least, that it's genuine high quality entertainment. I also hope that perhaps it's revealing of something, maybe. On the other hand, I want to avoid becoming pretentious in the eagerness to give my work deep meanings! I have an enormous ego and must resist the urge to come on like a know-it-all. Some of the imagery in my work is sorta scary because I'm basically a fearful, pessimistic person. I'm always seeing the predatory nature of the universe, which can harm you or kill you very easily and very quickly, no matter how well you watch your step. The way I see it, we are all just so much chopped liver. We have this great gift of human intelligence to help us pick our way through this treacherous tangle, but unfortunately we don't seem to value it very much. Most of us are not brought up in environments that encourage us to appreciate and cultivate our intelligence. To me, human society appears mostly to be a living nightmare of ignorant, depraved behavior. We're all depraved, me included. I can't help it if my work reflects this sordid view of the world. Also, I feel that I have to counteract all the lame, hero-worshipping crap that is dished out by the mass-media in a never-ending deluge.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 363

Books, World, Fear, Hope

“The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

On software patents, Quoted in "John Carmack: Knee Deep in the Voodoo" http://web.archive.org/web/20010624154450/http://www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/carmack/ Voodoo Extreme(2000-11-11)

Idea, Problem

“Our American newspapers serve a double purpose. They bring knowledge and information to their readers, and at the same time they play a most important part in connection with the business interests of the community, both through their news and advertising departments. Probably there is no rule of your profession to which you gentlemen are more devoted than that which prescribes that the editorial and the business policies of the paper are to be conducted by strictly separate departments. Editorial policy and news policy must not be influenced by business consideration; business policies must not be affected by editorial programs. Such a dictum strikes the outsider as involving a good deal of difficulty in the practical adjustments of c very-day management. Yet, in fact, I doubt if those adjustments are any more difficult than have to be made in every other department of human effort. Life is a long succession of compromises and adjustments, and it may be doubted whether the press is compelled to make them more frequently than others do.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Life, Communication, Business, Knowledge

“There is…a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)

Men, Money, War, People

“[S]ocialism has never been a particularly stable or coherent program, a point I made in these pages in 2010. It has always been best defined as whatever socialists want it to be at any given moment. That is because its chief utility is as a romantic indictment of the capitalist status quo. As many of the defenders of the new socialist craze admit, socialism is the off-the-shelf alternative to capitalism, which has been in bad odor since at least the financial crisis of 2008.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Socialism is So Hot Right Now (2018)

“The dialogue is laughably cheesy throughout, but perhaps that's part of Basic Instinct's appeal. In fact, there are times when the film comes close to achieving a status where it's so bad it becomes entertaining. … If you're looking for an intelligent thriller with real characters, Basic Instinct will seem like a fraud. If, on the other hand, you don't care whether the story makes sense and all you're in search of are cheap thrills and naked bodies, the movie delivers. Then again, so does a lot of Cinemax's late night programming.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=199 of Basic Instinct (1992). Two star reviews

Search, Intelligence, Fraud, Sense

“To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

Ben Bernanke (1953) American economist

Speech given on Apr. 7, 2010 to the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce, "Economic Challenges: Past, Present and Future" http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20100407a.pdf. (See pages 13-14 of the speech transcript).

Education

“[A computer program for Task A qua an explanatory model and how a human cognizer actually carries out Task A are equivalent in the strong sense when it can be shown that]… the model and the organism are carrying out the same process.”

Zenon Pylyshyn (1937) Canadian philosopher

Source: Computation and cognition, 1984, p. xv; As cited in: Journal of Intelligent Systems, Volume 4. (1994), p. 313

Sense, Strong

“117: It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and, learning to be self-critical?”

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

Children, Education, Learning

“In the beginning, at least for academics, there was philosophy. All of learned inquiry occurred within the discipline of philosophy and was carried out by philosophers. We retain the vestiges of this organization in our practice of awarding a single advanced academic degree, the Ph. D. or Doctor of Philosophy.’ As our understanding of the world around us grew, however, various areas of philosophy became sufficiently well understood to graduate into their own disciplines. Mathematics and the physical and biological sciences were the first to appear, followed more recently by the social sciences. Emerging as its own discipline is only the first step toward becoming a mature field of study. Economics is unique among the social sciences for the number of remaining steps it has taken. Unlike many social sciences, economics has a well-defined core set of methods. The first year graduate program in economics is virtually indistinguishable across American universities, consisting of microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics. As a result, economics can be easily defined by its tools of inquiry as by the target of its inquiry.”

Larry Samuelson (1953) American economist

Larry Samuelson. "Bounded Rationality and Game Theory", The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Vol. 36, Special Issue, 1996, pages 17-35.

World, Mathematics, Understanding, Study

“This year we must continue to improve the quality of American life. Let us fulfill and improve the great health and education programs of last year, extending special opportunities to those who risk their lives in our armed forces. I urge the House of Representatives to complete action on three programs already passed by the Senate—the Teacher Corps, rent assistance, and home rule for the District of Columbia. In some of our urban areas we must help rebuild entire sections and neighborhoods containing, in some cases, as many as 100,000 people. Working together, private enterprise and government must press forward with the task of providing homes and shops, parks and hospitals, and all the other necessary parts of a flourishing community where our people can come to live the good life. I will offer other proposals to stimulate and to reward planning for the growth of entire metropolitan areas. Of all the reckless devastations of our national heritage, none is really more shameful than the continued poisoning of our rivers and our air. We must undertake a cooperative effort to end pollution in several river basins, making additional funds available to help draw the plans and construct the plants that are necessary to make the waters of our entire river systems clean, and make them a source of pleasure and beauty for all of our people. To attack and to overcome growing crime and lawlessness, I think we must have a stepped-up program to help modernize and strengthen our local police forces. Our people have a right to feel secure in their homes and on their streets—and that right just must be secured. Nor can we fail to arrest the destruction of life and property on our highways.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, People, Health, Pleasure

“I foresee great refinements in the field of short-pulse microwave signaling, whereby several simultaneous programs may occupy the same channel, in sequence, with incredibly swift electronic communication; vastly important developments in microwave technique, whereby present clumsy connecting leads between wall or floor sockets and electric devices like toasters and vacuum sweepers may become unnecessary; gigantic magnetrons and klystrons, or their successors, will generate megawatts in microwaves; living rooms and their occupants will be heated by high-frequency waves from walls or ceilings; short waves will be generally used in the kitchen for roasting and baking, almost instantaneously”

Lee De Forest (1873–1961) American inventor

"Dawn of the Electronic Age" http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/03/20/dawn-of-the-electronic-age/, Popular Mechanics, January 1952

Communication

“It is a common error, as we have pointed out several times, to interpret opposition to U. S. intervention and aggression as support for the programs of its victims, a useful device for state propagandists but one that often has no basis in fact.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 256.

Error, Support, Time

“Frameworks are skeletal structures of programs that must be fleshed out to build a complete application. For example, a windowing system or a simulation system can both be viewed as frameworks fleshed out by a windowed application or a simulation, respectively.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: a responsibility-driven approach (1989), p. 13

“If you resist, their job will be to "take you into custody"—which is a euphemism for seizing you, handcuffing you, and taking you to jail.At this point, it will be obvious that the regulation's purpose is to force barbers to charge at least $8—not by persuasion, but with a gun.Every government program, no matter how benign it may appear, is the same. Coercion is the reason—and the only reason—it is a government program.”

Harry Browne (1933–2006) American politician and writer

Part One, chapter 2, page 12
1990s, Why Government Doesn't Work (1996)

Appearance

“I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.”

Jerry Pournelle (1933–2017) American science fiction writer and journalist

Chaos Manor, Byte magazine, October 1990, page 84.
Assorted

Time

“Is this a real blue-collar bar or a simulacrum thereof?”
“Both. It started out as a pure simulacrum, a few years ago, before the economy crashed, when it was hip for twentysomethings to move down here and dress in Carhartts and Utilikilts. But they did such a good job of it that actual blue-collar people began to show up. And then the economy did crash, and the hip people discovered that they were, in actual point of fact, blue collar, and probably always would be. So you’ve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks and college degrees, and they program the lathes in computer languages. I was trying to come up with a name for them. Cerulean-collar workers, maybe.”
“Do a lot of people stop by here on their way to the private jet terminal?”
“You’d be surprised.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 17, Seattle
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

People, Color, Way, Guy

“And these programs that you mentioned — that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward — are all entitlement programs built to make government our god. And that's really what's happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We're supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.”

Sharron Angle (1949) Former member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007

Jon
Ralston
Angle: “What’s happening (in America)..is a violation of the 1st Commandment,” entitlements “make government our God.”
2010-08-04
Las Vegas Sun
http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/ralstons-flash/2010/aug/04/angle-whats-happening-america-violation-1st-comman/
from interview with TruNews Christian Radio's Rick Wiles, 2010-03-21

God, Dependency, Country

“If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Linux 1.3.53 CodingStyle documentation, 2011-08-13, 1995 https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst, 1990s, 1995-99

“Most programming languages are decidedly inferior to mathematical notation and are little used as tools of thought in ways that would be considered significant by, say, an applied mathematician.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

§0
Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

Way, Mathematics

“And we can always supply them with a program that makes identical files into links to a single file.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199709292012.NAA09616@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Within the vast, virtually limitless piano repertoire, the piano sonatas of Sergei Prokofiev occupy a special place. Apart from Alexander Scriabin early in the century, Prokofiev was the only major twentieth-century composer to pay such consistent attention to the form, … They are a constant presence in concert programs and are considered an indispensable part of the repertoire by almost every serious concert pianist.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Preface

Parting

“8: A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.”

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

“The calculated ambiguity of expression is based on the confusion of experience as reflected in the architectural program.”

Robert Venturi book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

3. Ambiguity
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)

“• Realignment of P2.915 billion in the budget of the Department of Social Welfare and Development, specifically from the Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program and the KALAHI-CIDSS projects to Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens which will benefit 460,647 senior citizens at a total cost of P2.770 billion in line with R. A. No. 9994 or the Expanded Senior Citizens Act of 2010. Additional funding of P20 million will also be provided for the Comprehensive Project for Street Children, Street Families and Indigent Peoples-especially Badjaos, as well as an additional P95 million for Protective Services for Individuals and Families in Difficult Circumstances.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Children, People, Family

“Why do I think that Turing's paper "On computable numbers" is so important? Well, in my opinion it's a paper on epistemology, because we only understand something if we can program it, as I will explain in more detail later. And it's a paper on physics, because what we can actually compute depends on the laws of physics in our particular universe and distinguishes it from other possible universes. And it's a paper on ontology, because it shows that some real numbers are uncomputable, which I shall argue calls into question their very existence, their mathematical and physical existence.”

Gregory Chaitin (1947) Argentinian mathematician and computer scientist

"Epistemology as information theory: From Leibniz to Omega." https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0506552 arXiv preprint math/0506552 (2005). p. 3

Law, Mathematics, Understanding, Question

“This monograph is about the current status of the faculty psychology program; not so much its evidential status (which I take to be, for the most part, an open question ) as what the program is and where it does, and doesn't, seem natural to try to apply it. Specifically I want to do the following things: (1) distinguish the general claim that there are psychological faculties from a particular version of that claim, which I shall call the modularity thesis; (2) enumerate some of the properties that modular cognitive systems are likely to exhibit in virtue of their modularity; and (3) consider whether it is possible to formulate any plausible hypothesis about which mental processes are likely to be the modular ones. Toward the end of the discussion, I'll also try to do something by way of (4) disentangling the faculty jmodularity issues from what I'll call the thesis of Epistemic Boundedness: the idea that there are endogenously determined constraints on the kinds of problems that human beings can solve, hence on the kinds of things that we can know.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 1-2

Way, Idea, Question, Nature

“Bernie wants us to live under the heavenly socialist–communist system like China. We never hear the left criticize that Mao Tse-Tung killed over 80 million people—the Chinese government admits—biggest mass murder in history. That's why there's so many liberal trendy places in Austin, in Denver, in New York, in LA, and San Francisco named after Mao. And people go and love play on their iPhones and the free market and their Chinese slave goods, and they drink beer and expensive wine and giggle about how fun it is to wear red stars. You couldn't put more bad luck on you, you couldn't trash your mojo better. Wearing swastika armbands, you stupid snot-nosed crud! That live off the backs of everybody that fought Nazism and Communism. You need to have your jaws broken! Don't you worry, reality is gonna crash in on you, trash! Who lowered our defenses and brought the Republic down; oh, we're already gone! And you celebrate it like you've joined the globalists mounting America's head on the wall, your great victory! A mass rape of women across Europe. The national draft coming in for women! The families falling apart! Women degraded into nothing but sexual objects! ALL in the name of Gloria Steinem and the Central Intelligence Agency program! And a Bernie Sanders with his fake Einstein hair, and his 'I'm a man of the people!' We go out and talk to Bernie Sanders' supporters, they can hardly talk—they're like him—'Free! Free! I want free stuff!' As if the New World Order is gonna give you anything free! Oh, it's free like a piece of cheese. And a little mouse comes out and it smells it and goes to bite it and, WA BAM! Breaks your neck. But your stupider than the little mouse. You can see all the countries and all the people caught in the mouse traps, caught in the big bear traps. You know what you do? You go into a trendy shop. On some capitalist strip. And you go in and you snuggle in with that credit card that daddy put money in for the trust fund. And you put on that little fur-rimmed coat and you're all sexy with your hammer and sickle on, and your Che Guevara and, you know, shirt from Rage Against the Machine, and the whole capitalist record company system selling it to you, and you go out on the street and you walk into McDonald's and you have yourself a double latte, oh yeah. Pathetic! Scum! Oh, how you'll burn in the camps, later. Wishing you had done something; I mean, you are the ultimate chumps, the ultimate buffoons, the ultimate schmucks!… But the public had so much freedom! They were so wealthy, even our poorest, they had no idea that what they were replacing it with was abject slavery.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Sanders Supporters are Pathetic Scum" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNxJnf_UAI, February 2016

Love, Women, Money, Bad luck

“I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

OS/2 Programmers Guide, November 1987
1980s

Time

“The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

[David, Brooks, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion, The Big Test, New York Times, February 23, 2009, February 24, 2009]
2000s

War, People, School, Family

“In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 101

People, World, Art, Imagination

“Republicans bring out Colin Powell and J. C. Watts because they have no program, no policy. The play that game because they have no other game. They have no love and no joy. They'd rather take pictures with black children than feed them.”

Donna Brazile (1959) American author, educator, and political activist and strategist

As quoted in "Gore Aide Dealt From Bottom of Race Deck, Powell Says" http://www.highbeam.com/Search?searchTerm=%22Republicans+bring+out+Colin+Powell%22 (7 January 2000), by Ceci Connolly, The Washington Post

Love, Children, Game, Joy

“The work itself will cover a wide field including clearance of slums, which for adequate reasons cannot be undertaken by private capital; in rural housing of several kinds, where, again, private capital is unable to function; in rural electrification; in the reforestation of the great watersheds of the Nation; in an intensified program to prevent soil erosion and to reclaim blighted areas; in improving existing road systems and in constructing national highways designed to handle modern traffic; in the elimination of grade crossings; in the extension and enlargement of the successful work of the Civilian Conservation Corps; in non-Federal works, mostly self-liquidating and highly useful to local divisions of Government; and on many other projects which the Nation needs and cannot afford to neglect.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, State of the Union address (1935)

Success, Housing

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

In response to the news that a colleague would not have as much time to devote to Emacs since the birth of his daughter, in Gmane (27 April 2005) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/36460 2000s

People, Help

“Romania is dying because of a lack of men, not a lack of programs.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Men

“A fourth enduring strand of policy has been to help improve the life of man. From the Marshall Plan to this very moment tonight, that policy has rested on the claims of compassion, and the certain knowledge that only a people advancing in expectation will build secure and peaceful lands. This year I propose major new directions in our program of foreign assistance to help those countries who will help themselves. We will conduct a worldwide attack on the problems of hunger and disease and ignorance. We will place the matchless skill and the resources of our own great America, in farming and in fertilizers, at the service of those countries committed to develop a modern agriculture. We will aid those who educate the young in other lands, and we will give children in other continents the same head start that we are trying to give our own children. To advance these ends I will propose the International Education Act of 1966. I will also propose the International Health Act of 1966 to strike at disease by a new effort to bring modern skills and knowledge to the uncared—for, those suffering in the world, and by trying to wipe out smallpox and malaria and control yellow fever over most of the world during this next decade; to help countries trying to control population growth, by increasing our research—and we will earmark funds to help their efforts. In the next year, from our foreign aid sources, we propose to dedicate $1 billion to these efforts, and we call on all who have the means to join us in this work in the world.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Hunger, Children, People

“If one wants to make a machine mimic the behaviour of the human computer in some complex operation one has to ask him how it is done, and then translate the answer into the form of an instruction table. Constructing instruction tables is usually described as "programming."”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

“I find OOP methodologically wrong. It starts with classes. It is as if mathematicians would start with axioms. You do not start with axioms - you start with proofs. Only when you have found a bunch of related proofs, can you come up with axioms. You end with axioms. The same thing is true in programming: you have to start with interesting algorithms. Only when you understand them well, can you come up with an interface that will let them work.”

Alexander Stepanov (1950) Russian programmer

An Interview with A. Stepanov by Graziano Lo Russo, 2008-04-25 http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html,

Understanding

“It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.”

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) Italian neurologist

Quoted in New York Times obituary http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/science/dr-rita-levi-montalcini-a-revolutionary-in-the-study-of-the-brain-dies-at-103.html?_r=0

Perfection

“So? If you don't like it, write your own [program].”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

1995/10
About Code

“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 (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, The Humble Programmer (1972)

Spring, Country

“Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 267

Books

“[W]hat intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft repeated, than the story of a large research program that impaled itself upon a false central assumption accepted by all practitioners? Do we regard all people who worked within such traditions as dishonorable fools? What of the scientists who assumed that the continents were stable, that the hereditary material was protein, or that all other galaxies lay within the Milky Way? These false and abandoned efforts were pursued with passion by brilliant and honorable scientists. How many current efforts, now commanding millions of research dollars and the full attention of many of our best scientists, will later be exposed as full failures based on false premises?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Fall in the House of Ussher", p. 187
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

People, Fools, Way, Failure

“Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)

Mathematics

“Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love (but only appreciate in some abstract sense). So let them all continue—the films, the books, the television programs, the zoos, the little half acre of ecological preserve in any community, the primary school lessons, the museum demonstrations, even […] the 6:00 A. M. bird walks. Let them continue and expand because we must have visceral contact in order to love. We really must make room for nature in our hearts.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Unenchanted Evening", p. 40
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Love, Books, School, Communication

“I have a suggestion for Microsoft — no fancy programming required. Just let us users hang out a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Then leave us alone. We're dreaming.”

Ellen Ullman (1949) American writer

[The Boss in the Machine, The New York Times, A15, San Francisco, 03624331, 19 February 2005]

Dreams

“I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, "Present Continuous - Future Perfect"

World, Beauty, Laughter

“Icons, windows, mice, big operating systems, huge programs, integrated packages…. I would like to remind the world that just because two things are on the same menu doesn't mean they taste good together.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

Programmers At Work (1986)

World

“The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1910s, Principles of Research (1918)

Lovers, Effort, Heart

“What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.”

Dennis M. Ritchie (1941–2011) American computer scientist

In a 1980 lecture "The Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing System", as quoted in Christopher Negus, Linux Bible 2010 Edition http://books.google.com/books?id=W5vItTVMLaYC&pg=PT650 (2010),

Communication, Time

“You have three people in the White House that are in love with eugenics, or whatever it is you would call it today. Of course it's not "eugenics", because eugenics has been horribly maligned. How did the T4 program start in Germany? It started through compassion, and it started because we needed to get control of the costs.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Beck links health care reform to Nazis, suggests reform would kill elderly and newborns
Media Matters for America
2009-08-06
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200908060009
The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2009-08-06
2000s, 2009

Love, People, Housing

“This is an excellent program. Nobody has said it has done a bad job. It is small. There are only about 50,000 visas a year. … As I ride my bike around New York City on the weekends, I see what immigrants do for America. This program has dramatically helped.”

Chuck Schumer (1950) U.S. Senator from the State of New York

Floor speech in the Senate https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4689088/schumer-visa-program (24 May 2006) celebrating the diversity visa program, as reported and quoted in "Schumer on Diversity Visa: 'This is an Excellent Program'" http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/11/01/schumer-champions-diversity-visa-excellent-program/ by Neil Munro, Breitbart.com (1 November 2017)

Help

“The initial motive for developing APL was to provide a tool for writing and teaching. Although APL has been exploited mostly in commercial programming, I continue to believe that its most important use remains to be exploited: as a simple, precise, executable notation for the teaching of a wide range of subjects.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

"A Personal View of APL", IBM Systems Journal, 30 (4), 1991

Motivation

“• New General Provision stipulating that the Monitoring and Evaluation Expenses of the agencies mandated to implement or oversee the implementation of programs and projects shall not exceed three percent (3%) of the project or program cost.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

“Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Dantzig (1983) "Reminiscences about the origins of linear programming". In: Mathematical programming : the state of the art. New York, 1983, p. 78-86.

World, Optimism, Problem, Decision

“He [Gilels] played in an easy, natural manner, with strong but unassuming musicianship. His technique was brilliant; years later Neuhaus, still astonished, was to recall Gilels's incredible octaves in Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody. Yet Gilels was never looked upon as a mere virtuoso. As a matter of fact, his programs did not often include music pour epater le bourgeois. He played a stedy diet of Beethoven (the Hammerklavier was a work that strongly engaged his last years), Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms. In many respects, the great virtuoso who put his authoritative stamp on whatever he played was, at the same time, a thinking man's pianist.”

Emil Gilels (1916–1985) Soviet pianist

Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Pianists

Music, Nature, Thinking, Strong

“Do women avoid fields like engineering because of the tendency of male-dominated fields to discriminate against women? Probably not. Prior to the women's movement, engineering was no more male-dominated than medicine and law. And women have entered medicine and law by the droves. When women enter male-dominated fields, they tend to enter the more glamorous occupations. And the media reinforces this. There was L. A. Law, but no L. A. Engineering. ER doesn't mean Engineering Room. Women receive six layers of encouragement to enter fields involving engineering, computers, and math and science: first, better starting salaries than men's; second, special programs for girls in high school; third, female-only government scholarships; fourth, female-only corporate grants and scholarships; fifth, the advertising that reaches out to women to create a more female-supportive atmosphere; and sixth, special grants for science programs at leading women's colleges.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 25.

Women, Men, School, Law

“Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement”

Hal Abelson (1947) computer scientist

Source: anusf.anu.edu.au http://anusf.anu.edu.au/~drw900/quotes.html - MIT job advertisement

Knowledge

“Speech is an acoustic reality, writing a visual one. Performance of the former has been perfected through a million years of natural selection in the evolutionary process. The latter is a trick which we began to learn only yesterday (in terms of evolutionary time). To "hear" language (and to "say" it) is programmed in our genes; to "see" it (and "read" it) is not.”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

Nature, Reality, Learning, Time

“In the post-Vietnam War era the need for Communist abuses has been no less pressing than before. More facts have come to light on the scope of U. S. violence in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the extent of which U. S. officials lied to the public with regard to their programs and methods, and the brazenness with which these officials defied treaty obligations and international law. Much as the government and the media tried to isolate the scoundrelism of Watergate from the much more profound immorality of the “secret” devastation of Cambodia, the linkage between the two could not be entirely concealed and therefore tended to discredit still further the campaign to bring “freedom” to South Vietnam. Counterrevolution, torture and official murder in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, and other U. S. satellites was also reaching new peaks. Thus, if Cambodian terror did not exist, the Western propaganda systems would have had to invent it, and in certain respects it did […].”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 19.

War, Secret, Law, Freedom

“My first serious programming work was done in the very early 1960s, in Assembler languages on IBM and Honeywell machines. Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous. Into the Honeywell programs, which formed a little system for an extremely complex payroll, I wrote some assertions, with run-time tests that halted program execution during production runs. Time constraints didn't allow restarting a run from the beginning of the tape. So for the first few weeks I had the frightening task on several payroll runs of repairing an erroneous program at the operator’s keyboard ¾ correcting an error in the suspended program text, adjusting the local state of the program, and sometimes modifying the current and previous tape records before resuming execution. On the Honeywell 400, all this could be done directly from the console typewriter. After several weeks without halts, there seemed to be no more errors. Before leaving the organisation, I replaced the run-time halts by brief diagnostic messages: not because I was sure all the errors had been found, but simply because there would be no-one to handle a halt if one occurred. An uncorrected error might be repaired by clerical adjustments; a halt in a production run would certainly be disastrous.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson (2000), "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection", in: IEEE Annals of Software Engineering, Volume 22 Number 2, pages 61-63, 66, April-June 2000.

Error, Time, Drawing

“Not long after riots broke out in Ferguson late last summer, I asked my staff to tell me how many people shot by police were African-American in this country. I wanted to see trends. I wanted to see information. They couldn’t give it to me, and it wasn’t their fault. Demographic data regarding officer-involved shootings is not consistently reported to us through our Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Because reporting is voluntary, our data is incomplete and therefore, in the aggregate, unreliable.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

People, Summer, Country

“The minute you take away somebody the public's voting for, you're screwing with the program. There's no logic to it.”

Nigel Lythgoe (1949) Executive producer and television director

On accusations that American Idol is rigged.
Keveney, Bill (June 18, 2002), "Viewers 'Idol'-ize this saucy search for a superstar". USA Today :Life,01d

“I'm against abstinence programs because I really consider "abstinence only" child abuse.”

Joycelyn Elders (1933) American pediatrician, public health administrator, and former Surgeon General of the United States

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, "Abstinence" http://www.sho.com/site/video/player.do?video=/134/2006/abstinence&seriesid=134 [4.10], 5 June 2006 Abstinence education

“The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

The Big Bang in Astronomy, New Scientist, Vol. 92, No. 1280 (November 19, 1981), p. 527

Chance

“LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use (after FORTRAN)… Its core occupies some kind of local optimum in the space of programming languages given that static friction discourages purely notational changes. Recursive use of conditional expressions, representation of symbolic information externally by lists and internally by list structure, and representation of program in the same way will probably have a very long life.”

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

John McCarthy (1979) " History of Lisp http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/lisp/lisp.html," as quoted in: Avron Barr, Edward Feigenbaum. The Handbook of artificial intelligence, Volume 2. Addison-Wesley, 1986. p. 5 1970s

Life, Way, Change

“I took some bad acid in November of 1965, and the after effect left me crazy and helpless for six months. My mind would drift into a place that was very electrical and crackly, filled with harsh, abrasive, low grade, cartoony, tawdry carnival visions. There was a nightmarish mechanical aspect to everyday life. My ego was so shattered, so fragmented that it didn't get in the way during what was the most unself-conscious period of my life. I was kind of on automatic pilot and was still constantly drawing. Most of my popular characters—Mr. Natural, Flaky Foont, Angelfood McSpade, Eggs Ackley, The Snoid, The Vulture Demonesses, Av' n' Gar, Shuman the Human, the Truckin' guys, Devil Girl—all suddenly appeared in the drawings in my sketchbook in this period, early 1966. Amazing! I was relieved when it was finally over, but I also immediately missed the egoless state of that strange interlude. LSD put me somewhere else. I wasn't sure where. All I know is, it was a strange place. Psychedelic drugs broke me out of my social programming. It was a good thing for me, traumatic though, and I may have been permanently damaged by the whole thing, I'm not sure. I see LSD as a positive, important life experience for me, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 132

Life, Way, Guy, Girl

“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 (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1968) " A Case against the GO TO Statement http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF" cited in: Bill Curtis (1981) Tutorial, human factors in software development. p. 109. 1960s

Time

“I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.”

Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) Danish programmer and creator of PHP

Itconversations.com http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail58.html

“Unwrapping occurs when the "solution" is explicitly built into the program from the start.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 3. Echoing Emergence, p. 137

“The federal government and the state government must not fear programs who change lives, but must welcome those faith-based programs for the embetterment of mankind.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks at a luncheon http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/WCPD-2002-08-26/html/WCPD-2002-08-26-Pg1411.htm for gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon in Stockton, California, August 23, 2002. 2000s, 2002

Fear, Faith, Change

Quotes about program page 6

Quotes about program
page 6