I started this quotes file (which, incidentally, is formatted so you can use it with fortune) because of the first quote in it -- a quote of revolutionary import and eternal significance, despite its modern provenance. My criteria for inclusion follow: - was it worth reading the first time I read it? - will it still be worth reading in ten years? - does it say something significant? - have I never seen it in a collection of quotes before, or in an analogous place, such as somebody's .signature? - is it short enough -- i.e. less than a screenful? Not among the criteria: - is it well-written? - was the author aware of the significance of what they said? - is it serious? - is it funny? - is it inoffensive? - is it offensive? So you will find both well and poorly written quotes, serious and non-serious quotes, funny and non-funny, etc. Use it in good health. -- Kragen Sitaker, kragen@pobox.com, 1999-09-28 % Over the years, people have told me over and over again that I cannot win this battle or that, and I should give up. When I have ignored them, I have often had at least partial success. So I've learned that it is wisest not to pay too much attention to this kind of advice. Especially when a person who objects to the goal tells me it is impossible, that is likely to be wishful thinking. -- Richard M. Stallman, in <199909281503.JAA23841@aztec.santafe.edu>, around 1999-09-28 15:00 UTC % The "freedom to choose a license" which denies others essential freedoms is not really a freedom. It is a form of power, of domination over others. Your description makes it sound like a matter of individual freedom by obscuring the presence of the others in the situation. The GPL is designed to protect the essential freedoms for everyone, by denying anyone the power to take them away. But the GPL does not apply to anyone who "touches the GPL'd world in any way". It only applies to writing programs that include GPL-covered code. There are many other ways one can "touch" GPL-covered software, other than by copying it into your work. The GPL does not apply to the others. -- Richard M. Stallman, in <199909281504.JAA23880@aztec.santafe.edu>, around 1999-09-28 15:00 UTC % "Steve, do you want to sell colored plastic all your life or do you want to change the world?" -- John Jensen, in <7ouqfe$ikb$1@nnrp03.primenet.com>, around 1999-08-12, on the subject of Macintosh versus Linux % John, you are a vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You Wintroll worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with the instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A Wintroll sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer on the lips than be seen with you. You are a fiend and a sniveling, back-boneless coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you especially your Mac hatred. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum. And I wish you would go away from CSMA. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a putrefaction, a big suck on a sour lemon with a lime twist. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. % Someone please back me up or tell me I'm crazy. -- Anonymous Coward on Slashdot % It's usually a big mistake to assume that a number of experts on a given subject disagree with you because they don't grasp the true situation. -- Chip Salzenberg, in <19991017171836.C16200@perlsupport.com> on perl5-porters, around 1999-10-18. % There is something callous about the general idea that people deserve the consequences of their foolish choices, that this is some kind of automatic justice. I think we should reject the idea in general, because it leads to blaming the victim. You may have heard the saying, "People get the government they deserve." I change that to, "People get the government their behavior deserves; people deserve better than that." I don't want to refuse my sympathy to people who get in a lasting bad situation because they were foolish or did not think clearly. In such cases, the problems typically do not affect only those who choose to use the proprietary software, because the consequences affect those around them too--even if they did not make the choice. In other words, all the people get what some of the people's behavior deserves. -- Richard M. Stallman, in <199910231610.KAA29512@aztec.santafe.edu>, around 1999-10-23 16:00 UTC % Plotted, you have a curve asymptotically approaching the sex axis where hack approaches zero, and asymptotically approaching the hack axis where sex approaches zero. -- Karsten M. Self, explaining the basics of economics, in <381A8A13.FC8C4A63@ix.netcom.com>, around 1999-10-29 % Economics doesn't change ethics. It makes giving up hypocrisy cheaper. -- Stephen J. Turnbull, in <14362.41456.818682.815292@turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>, around 1999-10-30 % Plus to be able to assert that an arbitrary loss of one can be made up by a sufficiently large gain in the other, you must assume global conditions that are both unreasonable and false. Unless you are capable of replacing your need for sufficient oxygen to live with sufficiently large amounts of granite? I did not think so! -- Ben Tilly, in . around 1999-10-31, questioning the mathematical foundations of economics % Forgetting is part of learning. You weed out the unessential ... with a risk, so as to keep things manageable. That is what waste paper baskets are for. I should know, I am very bad at weeding out, I tend to consider everything as potentially useful, which it is, and my office is a mess. -- Bernard Lang, in <19991107015420.A18117@margaux.inria.fr>, around 1999-11-06, on the Free Software Business list % I tend to think that successful software production is a hard task that metrics and other process engineering can help to improve, but the major determinants are largely outside the scope of what managerial sciences can address. -- Craig Brozefsky, in <87eme0rzmr.fsf@piracy.red-bean.com>, around 1999-11-09, on the Free Software Business list % Several times companies have called up and said basically, "We have this ad campaign planned. It is $20 million. We have already shot the commercial and booked the air time. But we have discovered our Web site is no good. What should we do?" The answer is, you are sort of doomed. -- Jakob Nielsen, NY Times, 1999-11-02 (via Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater, <199911090530.VAA94294@alpha.oac.ucla.edu> % The laws are so complex and inconsistent they remind me of source code. -- Ben Sittler, on traffic laws, 1999-11-27, in an Arby's parking lot % When you go to achieve some new great thing, it is really helpful to only try to achieve *one* amazing thing at a time. If you try to do two or three, then the product of narrow probabilities bites you in the ass, and your chances of success dwindle to insignificance. -- Crispin Cowan, in <384B5F32.10FDAD89@cse.ogi.edu>, around 1999-12-09, on the Free Software Business list % For example, I wrote the lexer thinking it could perhaps be the last lexer ever needed for Fortran--from legacy to new code. Whereas, by the time I got to the later phases of compilation, I was happy to just get the basics working. Turns out getting the basics working, and doing little more, leads to a more robust product. Some of the hairiest stuff in the front end is due to my trying to accommodate extensions I hadn't heard of yet. Sticking to a simple, clean language allows the compiler to be smaller, the maintainence load to be easier, and generally allows more people to work on it simultaneously (and productively) than otherwise, because there are fewer "global switches" for programmers to constantly track. -- Craig Burley, former g77 maintainer, on the history of g77, in http://world.std.com/~burley/g77-next.html, by 1999-09-18. % Perl's DBI module makes it very easy to get data in and out of (e.g.) Oracle and do useful stuff with it. The fact that I need to do this doesn't a priori mean that I'm eking out a miserable existence in some slime pit. -- Tim Moore , arguing that dealing with evil data formats is necessary, on comp.lang.lisp, in Usenet article <8btgtf$lnr$0@216.39.145.192>, on 2000-03-29 % As I've gained more experience with Perl it strikes me that it resembles Lisp in many ways, albeit Lisp as channeled by an awk script on acid. -- Tim Moore , on comp.lang.lisp, in Usenet article <8btgtf$lnr$0@216.39.145.192>, on 2000-03-29 % It all seems eerily familiar. So, even though I might rather be programming in Lisp and do worry occasionally about my mortal soul, many of the lessons I learned as a Lisp hacker are directly applicable in Perl. -- Tim Moore , arguing that Perl is not Satanic, on comp.lang.lisp, in Usenet article <8btgtf$lnr$0@216.39.145.192>, on 2000-03-29 &ctime($Time), $Name); system($Logger, "-t", $Me, $warning); % Ladies and gentlemen, there's a little lost puppy out there in the cold rain scratching on your back door, and the tag on its collar says "Security." Are we going to swat this puppy on the nose with the rolled up newspaper of bad programming habits? Or are we going to let it in, dry it off, feed it, and clean up the carpet when it craps all over the place? The decision is up to you, my friends, but I for one am heading to the store for some puppy chow and a pooperscooper. -- Matt Carothers , in BUGTRAQ message on 2000-03-31 % I do not believe we have memories the way an accountant has records. Memories have very little to do with What Happened. They are stories. Life, as it is, has no narrative thrust. No purpose. No inherent goals, rights, wrongs, or indeed any absolutes, except for the terrible facts of birth, suffering, and death. But we remember things. I think memory is an act. Not some passive looking back, but an ordering of events, often at variance with other people's memories, and more reliable records. That, to me, is sanity: to be able to weave a tapestry of memories into a story that makes sense, that creates something of beauty, even if it is sorrowful. -- Rev. J B Bell, before 1997-11-20, on his web page at http://www.swcp.com/~cipher/personal.html % Most scientists are scientists because they are afraid of life. It's wonderful to be creative in science because you can do it without clashing with people and suffering the pain of relationships, and making your way in the world. It's a wonderful out --- it's sort of this aseptic world where you can use the very exciting facilities you have and not encounter any pain. The pain in solving a problem is small potatoes compared with the pain you encounter in living. Introspection is not a scientific activity: it's not repeatable, there are no good theories about how to do it, what you expect to find. It's strange that by looking into yourself you really get an appreciation of the mystery of the universe. You don't by trying to find the laws of physics. -- John Backus, between 1991 and 1997, quoted in http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~mbsclass/is2000/hall_of_fame/backus.htm % Despite their revolutionary reputation, computers are mostly a conservative technology. The way that you make a computer is to start with some language and then inscribe that language into the workings of the hardware and software. Computer "inventions" usually take the form of long-familiar language being inscribed into this new medium. Of course, one can inscribe fancy new language into the medium, but then the resulting system probably won't fit very well into the world around it. Computer technology is conservative because it provides a vehicle for existing ways of understanding the world to be reified and made rigid and concrete in the workings of machinery. -- Phil Agre in a "notes and recommendations" post on the Red Rock Eater News Service from 2000-05-01 <200005010538.WAA113482@alpha.oac.ucla.edu> % This aint the old law, this is the new law. Easy? nope. This is the road less travled down by the old brown shoes. This is jack booted pron muching mp3 grabbing game addeled death metal thugs looking for better ways to rip off the "establishment" and by gum they are doing it. Bones Thugs and Source Code , each feeding off the other so that a sort of a darwinian code evolution slouches onward. -- Tom Whore on Gnutella on 2000-05-02, in on FoRK % . . . NOT FOLLOWING THIS RULE IS LIKELY TO KILL YOU. -- a no-nonsense safety rule from the Industrial Health and Safety Program of the Ontario Ministry of Labor (Alert #I12/0395) % I've listened to what readers have said, I've cared about what readers have said, and finally I've tried really hard NOT to care about what readers have said. Never could I imagine how hard it can be to have someone who doesn't know you actually know and care about something you do. -- Peter Zale, author of "Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet" comic strip, at http://www.peterzale.com/thoughts/abyss.html, on 2000-05-22. % . . . the whole concept of having stuff like running a window being so complicated that tools are needed to generate the boilerplate code to save people from the tedium, kind of indicates that that code is too complicated. On a personal front, I'd much rather have it take 3 lines of code to drive a window than have a tool to write the 300 lines for me. -- SillyWiz on Slashdot at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/06/14/0127200&cid=185 on 2000-06-21 % I'll never regret not saving myself for marriage, but I'll always be glad that I had the good sense to save myself for love. -- Rose "mathgoddess/mickle" Platt, in on sex-wizards, on 2000-05-19, discussing her sex life % The way I learn is to have a thought, then test it out to see if it is a good thought. Code is the best way I know of to do this. Code isn't swayed by the power and logic of rhetoric. Code isn't impressed by college degrees or large salaries. Code just sits there, happily doing exactly what you told it to do. If that isn't what you thought you told it to do, that's your problem. -- Kent Beck, in _Extreme Programming Explained_, p. 44, in late 1999 or early 2000 % Code-fester seems to decline unless new 'talent' or specifications are injected. It's like the bugs need new food, and being further away from the core working components seems to slow down the festering process. -- Bernd Felsche, bernie@innovative.iinet.net.au, on alt.folklore.computers, in message-id <8lh601$orq$1@flywheel.innovative.iinet.net.au>, around 2000-07-24 % And if we didn't reinvent the wheel over and over, we'd never have steel belted radials. -- Eugene Miya, eugene@cse.ucsc.edu, on alt.folklore.computers, in message-id <398609c3$1@news.ucsc.edu>, around 2000-07-31 % I think that having existing code hobble along in [a] way that sometimes loses information is not a good thing. I have never subscribed to the Unixlike idea that "mostly working most of the time" is good enough. I think it's better for incompatible changes to cause code to not work at all than to lose in obscure ways. Otherwise it will never get fixed. -- Jamie W. Zawinski, jwz@jwz.org, on bug-lucid-emacs, around 1993-05-26, describing why he broke backward compatibility in Lucid Emacs % Apache was an also ran, it was not MS IIS it was not Lotus Domnino It was not whatever Large Corporate Web Server was being sold to IT wonks who sit behind large stacks of PC Weeks and ZD Dead Paper Clippins. Apache was not the obvious child. Didnt matter. Nope. Cause apache had the spiritus sanctum in namina hackum and rockidly rolldidly. IN short it was a case of Bawitdaba da bangdabang niggie diggie diggie sed the boogie sed up jump the boogie Versus Boring Excuse Driven IT WOnkery. Now I know this is an oversimplification spoken to a crowd who loves to complicate everything to the point of 8 rounds of white papers and a drafting commitie just to decide who is going to go out and get the bagels...but listen for a sec. Just Do It... Just grab the tools you want and use the standards you want and work the way your heart says and fuck all if it wont work out,. -- Tom Whore, aka Tom Higgins, , on FoRK, around 2000-08-11, in Message-ID % Get enough beyond FUM [Fuck You Money], and it's merely Nice To Have Money. -- Dave Long, , on FoRK, around 2000-08-16, in Message-ID <200008162000.NAA10898@maltesecat> % I still remember converting a big ugly mortgage amortization program. Afterwards the customer said to me, "What did you do? We put in a feature a few years ago but it never worked. It's started working now!" All I did was get rid of some of the ugliness, and the code's true inner self shone through. Or something like that. -- Charlie Gibbs, , on alt.folklore.computers, around 2000-08-21, in Message-ID <1344.268T888T9903957@sky.bus.com> % An irrational loathing for threads is silly when there are enough rational reasons to loathe them. -- Donn Cave, , on comp.lang.python, around 2000-08-28, in Message-ID <8oedtc$3ibc$1@nntp6.u.washington.edu> % Using products in ways in which they weren't intended is a big part of the American ideal. If the Wright Brothers hadn't used bicycle parts in a way for which they SERIOUSLY weren't intended, it might take a lot longer to get to that ski vacation today... -- Dr. Zowie, , around 2000-09-05, on the Slashdot.org article about the CueCat reverse engineering: 'Barcode Maker Responds After Forcing Drivers Offline' % On Sat, 16 Sep 2000 01:26:42 GMT, Tim Hammerquist wrote: >And actually, the prevailing author among clpm right now is HP >Lovecraft. Someone called another person a Perlish Nyarlathotep...and >some poor guy thought it was rot13; he was promptly, firmly, and >copiously corrected. =) Yeah, I guess Lovecraft works. perl shares at least two similar concepts: Things that so twisted and evil that the mere sight of them can drive any mortal insane, and names that mean disaster when you call them. -- Quinn Dunkan, , around 2000-09-17, in comp.lang.python, in Message-ID % I don't think you have a very clear idea of what supercomputers are or what sorts of problems they're used to solve. -- Jeff Drummond, , around 2000-09-22, in alt.folklore.computers, in Message-ID <8qgjc6$10rh8q$1@fido.engr.sgi.com>, reproaching me for some nasty remark about object file overhead on old Crays % Maybe what you were taught was wrong? I was taught similar definitions, but they were informal, so I've abandoned them. -- Brian Rogoff, , around 2000-09-25, in comp.lang.functional, in Message-ID , inadvertently demonstrating why functional languages are not widely used % Indeed, the current rage in OO seems to be eXtreme Programming - XP - where one of the axioms is to abandon programming with foresight, and instead rely on refactoring code as and when appropriate. My gut feeling is that this is a reasonable thing to do, but that it fits less well with e.g C++ (and in particular MFC) -- than with FP. -- Ketil Z Malde, , around 2000-09-26, in comp.lang.functional, in Message-ID , making a hilarious understatement % Basically, you need world-class programmers to design a complex system, but if you're dependent on the same world-class people to maintain it for you, you're in a world of hurt, because they won't, unless you give them offers they can't refuse. -- Ulf Wiger, , around 2000-09-27, in comp.lang.functional, in Message-ID , explaining one reason for the extreme conservatism of programmers' managers % "Party on" can't be self-indulgence, as it isn't possible to party alone. It's an inclusive phrase, near to the golden rule: a party is best enjoyed when the other guests are all enjoying it, as in conviviality. "Being excellent" I'll admit admits a wider range of interpretations, but if you take it to be an exhortation to only play positive sum games (as opposed to avoiding negative sum games, which is merely "good"), then it doesn't involve much in the way of denial. -- Dave Long, , around 2000-10-05, on FoRK, in Message-ID <200010051713.KAA13265@maltesecat> % Yes, such toys are ``unprofessional.'' I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer. -- JWZ , sometime in 1988, in an interview with themes.org, on easter eggs in Netscape % When we love another person, even force used in self-defense seems objectionable to us. We would at times rather endure pain than risk injuring the other in self-defense. Love creates an abhorrence of all force. It is not always possible for the therapist to esteem or respect the conduct of the client. In life it can be hard at times to respect our loved ones, and conversely it may be hard for them to always respect us. But love is unconditional --- it finds the *inherent worth* of the other human being. It says, "I'm happy knowing you're alive.". It says, "I cherish your life and will do everything I can to protect and to promote it." Love transcends the distinction between self and other. Love is the most ethically consistent experience, because selfishness and altruism no longer seem opposed or in conflict. When we take such joy in the existence of the other, his or her interests begin to approximate our own. When we promote the happiness of a loved one, we promote our own happiness as well. -- Peter Breggin, _Toxic Psychiatry_, 1991, Chapter 16, "Psychotherapy and Psychosocial programs" % In high school I was a very competitive runner: track, cross country, 10k, marathons, triathlons, etc. I learned a lot about life: hard work pays off eventually, things that seem impossible can be obtained working harder (and often harder than others), you have to believe you can reach high goals long before you make it, and there is always someone better than you are. Race times are hard facts that need no spin either for excuse or self-deprecation. I don't see technical accomplishments much differently, although certainly there are subjective angles. -- Stephen D. Williams , around 2001-01-04, on FoRK, in Message-ID <3A543896.B6695B4F@lig.net> % Any code -- shared or not -- developed in the presence of unclear requirements will be found to be wrong as the requirements are exposed. A successful library that is born into the world had a period of development where its requirements were discovered and its design modified accordingly. If that period of development was hidden, and if the developers used the library like you use it, then you'll find a well designed library that appears to have been purposefully designed. Don't be deceived. It, like all successful code, was raised from a small, helpless child. I never know how to reuse a piece of code until I've first used it. And I never know how to generalize something until I've used it at least twice, probably three times. -- anonymous Wiki author on the c2.com Wiki before 2001-01-04 % There is another aspect of the 40-hour principle that wasn't obvious to me at first, but which occurred to me this past Fall. In addition to helping control burnout, the 40-hour principle also sets up a challenge. It says, "you have 40 hours in a week to add value to the system --- use them wisely." I find that if I don't add much value to the system during the week, I don't feel like leaving after 40 hours -- I'm uneasy. But if I slow down and consider good, efficient, leveraged solutions to the problems I'm working on, I often solve these problems faster and better than if I had rushed to get a lot done. I've had some weeks like this when I actually felt good about going home having done less than 40 hours. -- Joshua Kerievsky , around 2001-01-02, on extremeprogramming@egroups.com (no message-ID available from the egroups archive) % Bad software is like those humorous posters depicting "a day at the beach", covered with hundreds of people doing ridiculous things. Little bits of it may be amusing, but they combine to make a whole that is messy and ugly. Good software is like Monet's Water Lilies, where the basic theme of the brush strokes builds up to an attractive whole. It's the miscellaneous collection of buildings of Oxford's Bodleian compared to the coherent whole of the Cambridge University Library. It's the soundtrack for a Tom & Jerry cartoon compared to a Bach fugue. -- Tony Finch, , on FoRK, around 2001-01-23, in Message-ID <20010123084721.G92905@hand.dotat.at> % wow it is sunny but thundering -- Paul Visscher, , on IRC, on 2001-08-30, summarizing the state of the universe in a brilliant six-word poem % I for one have always steered clear of politics of any kind, but the magnitude of the assault on us make it necessary to suspend our usual schedule and make an address; however we don't know what to say. The president is a douchebag, all those people are fucking dead and we are going to war and it's just hard to have a party. There is no comedy here. -- Chicken John, , in Message-ID <5.1.0.14.2.20010911171235.02c9cde0@laughingsquid.org>, explaining why a comedy show at his bar was cancelled the night of 2001-09-11, the day the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. % The only way to be a great writer is to write, and read, and talk with other authors; the only way to be a great chef is to cook, and eat, and dine with other chefs; the only way to be a great programmer is to code, and review code, and commune with other hackers. -- Damian Conway, ?, in pair Networks's Netshaker newsletter, volume 6, number 10, issue 68, December 2001 % My materialism is basically justified by: "Whoever has the most tools is likely to have the right tool for the job, be more efficient, and will likely be able to be more constructive and efficient overall." I have a negative interest in jewelry, but high interest in communication, computing devices, tools for hobbies (carbon fiber construction, home maint.), and books/pubs (knowledge). -- Stephen D. Williams, , on FoRK, around 2002-03-03, in Message-ID <3C82B0A2.6040705@lig.net> % For example, in the OO world you hear a good deal about "patterns". I wonder if these patterns are not sometimes evidence of case (c), the human compiler, at work. When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough-- often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write. -- Paul Graham, in http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html, before 2002-05-23 % A cultivated mind --- I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties --- finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future. It is possible, indeed, to become indifferent to all this, and that too without having exhausted a thousandth part of it; but only when one has had from the beginning no moral or human interest in these things, and has sought in them only the gratification of curiosity. -- John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, second chapter, about halfway through, 1863; see http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill2.htm % my threading model brings all the boys to the yard and they're like, that locks up harder than yours I could return to you asynchronously, but I'd have to charge -- Mike Shaver, on IRC, 2007-05-11, according to http://quotes.burntelectrons.org/2419 % The majority of people in the world, I think, are unduly unhappy and angry. -- Kamio Noelle Chambless, in a personal conversation, 2007-06-21 % What I'm objecting to is the attempted reduction of what, for all its faults, is a system aimed at helping people to flourish in a particular, important way, to a training camp for servicing economic demands. I don't care whether the qualification someone gets at the end of a period of education is called a degree or not. I do care that the various kinds of education we operate are directed at human flourishing. I'm a teacher, after all, and concerned that education should be good for students, not just for their potential employers. I'm also a humanities academic, and think that the kind of study I do and teach is good for people. It wouldn't be worth doing otherwise; but I'm not daft enough to think it's the only good. My worry is about losing this particular good, not that the proles from Catering and Hospitality Management will devalue my BA. More generally: those ... distinguishing useful from useless degree subjects need to ask themselves: useful for what? I teach philosophy --- not especially useful for increasing GDP, for instance; extremely useful for developing critical, autonomous thinkers. And being a critical, autonomous thinker is good for one: it makes one's life better. Or so I think, anyway. What's the alternative account of the good which your list of useful subjects are useful for? -- "sam c", in comment #43 on a Crooked Timber blog entry by Chris Bertram, entitled "Degrees in bootlicking", 2007-08-14, http://crookedtimber.org/2007/08/14/degrees-in-bootlicking/#comment-207435 % [In C under Unix] Bugs are planned, and the whole picture is all about the planning for bugs. Forth is about planning for good code where the bugs don't happen. If you say BEGIN AGAIN damn it, you mean BEGIN AGAIN not twenty other possible meanings based on C insisting that it is one of twenty different bugs that need extra hardware and software to be handled properly. -- Jeff Fox , in a discussion on comp.lang.forth, inadvertently explaining why Forth is not widely used, 2006-05-20, in message-id <1148149942.763594.292230@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>, subject "Re: hardware errors, do C and Forth need different things in hardware?" % You can do three things with a computer. You can try to make money and that is unlikely. You can try to become famous and that never happens. And you can have fun and that always works. Though at times for me it has become work rather than fun. -- Chuck Moore, in a talk on 1997-07-26, http://www.ultratechnology.com/color4th.html % ...it does not suffice to hone your own intellect (that will join you in the grave), you must teach others to hone theirs. -- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, in EWD-709, "My Hopes of Computing Science", Proc. 4th Int. Conf. on Software Engineering, Sept. 17-19, 1979, Munich, Germany, 1979, pp.2-3 % The last time we spoke, [my father] rambled on about what I was like as a little girl, how I used to ask my mother questions like "when will I stop wondering?" I guess that eventually I realized I'd never stop wondering and decided to make a career of wondering instead. -- Liz Rislove, 2008-01-07, on why she became a scientist, in http://stellae.livejournal.com/215783.html % You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself --- it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naive ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are. -- Richard P. Feynman, in a letter to Mr. Mano, student of Tomonaga % I'm either in the position of having totally fucked up, or having discovered a totally kickass advantage. The British defeated the Spanish in the 1600s because they could use Gallilean [sic] ballistics and the Spanish, as Catholics, could not, because Gallileo [sic] was banned by the Church. This changed world history. The Aristotlean [sic] ballistics of the Spanish required that the Spanish get close to the British ships. The British had better guns with better range, and the Spanish never got close enough to hit them. Heresy is a powerful thing. It can be a powerful advantage. But it's only an advantage when it's actually true. -- Giles Bowkett, 2007-10-21, on a comment on a post on Reginald Braithwaite's blog entitled, "How to use a blunt instrument to sharpen your saw" http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/10/how-to-use-blunt-instrument-to-sharpen.html % KragenSitaker: If saying what you mean means nothing to you, then yes, it's [the difference between "== None" and "is None" in Python] a meaningless distinction. ... CSWookie: Are you accusing me of being insufficiently concerned about semantics? I think that's a new one :) KragenSitaker: That's what I've accused you of, yes. -- Me and Aaron Lehmann, 2008-04-20, on #python on Freenode % The very low heritability of eye number does not tell us that it is easy to increase how many eyes someone has by exercise, education and training, manipulating diet, manipulating ambient light, trepanation, etc. -- Cosma Shalizi, 2007-09-27, in http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html % ...I find myself thinking of a checklist [Piotr] Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life. -- Gary Wolf in Wired 16.05, 2008-04-21 % Wikipedia is an excellent source of unreliable information :-) That isn't snide, because information of known unreliability is a damn sight better than no information - for example, it often gives pointers to things to look up. -- Nick McLaren in message-id , on comp.arch, 2008-04-30 % It's hard to imagine any aspect of public life where ignorance or delusion is better than an awareness of the truth, even an unpleasant one. Only children and madmen engage in "magical thinking," the fallacy that good things can come true by believing in them or bad things will disappear by ignoring them or wishing them away. Rational adults want to know the truth, because any action based on false premises will not have the effects they desire. -- Steven Pinker, in his introduction to _Dangerous Ideas_, republished in Edge Edition 246 on 2008-06-10 % To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. -- Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, according to apenwarr in % The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences. That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to- mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can't do both; the first one obliterates the second. -- Neal Stephenson, before 2003-10-10, in "Why I am a Bad Correspondent" % The blogger is making a serious point. It is not obvious that it is in the long-term interests of China to facilitate military spending by a power which appears committed to unilateral military hegemony over the planet — a commitment which is highly liable to draw it into conflict with China. A situation where the U.S. pursues — or even appears to pursue — a highly militarised energy policy, substantially funded by borrowing from one of its energy competitors, does not seem stable. And again, one is left asking whether Chinese policy simply reflects obtuseness — and if it does, what is the likelihood that the Chinese will cease being obtuse, and would be the implications if they did. -- David Habakkuk, commenting on Brad Setser's blog post, "Lehman v Argentina", at , 2008-09-16 % I have long been of the opinion that fact and reason are our most important weapons in the neverending struggle against oppression, doubt and despair. If I can use them to spread hope and guide people toward useful action, then I'm doing the right thing. -- Meredith Patterson, discussing her comments on California’s Proposition 8 in the 2008 US election % When I predicted earlier this year that we were facing the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, I did not anticipate that conditions would deteriorate so badly. -- George Soros, in "The Crisis & What to Do About It", in the New York Review of Books, volume 55, number 19, December 4, 2008 % In my opinion, the problems with tip culture on the web are many, not least the evidence that most of the page-view-obsessed poopers of online tips seem to have zero real interest in solving any problem beyond their own need to generate repeat traffic from dazed information tourists. -- Merlin Mann, 2008-12-03, in "Real Advice Hurts", a post to his well-known blog "43 Folders" % I have worked as a commercial hardware and software developer in Real Jobs now for about 15 years. I have used, in production scenarios, C, C++, C#, Dynamic C (embedded programming), VHDL, Verilog, SQL, Javascript, and Python. I have written embedded microcontroller programs, C compilers targeting FPGAs and exotic dataflow (MONARCH) architectures, multiprocessor simulators, enterprise workflow applications, and high-volume web sites. I have implemented digital logic for the StarCore SC140s DSP core, as well as designed various IP digital logic cores, including a Viterbi decoder and an SHA-1 hashing engine. I am not a weenie. -- Rick Copeland, 2007-03-25, in "Dynamic Language Weenies?", getting defensive about his programming credentials on his blog "Just a little Python" % My official job title is “Senior Technical Consultant II”. It’s mentioned on my business cards (which I’ve never handed out yet). If non-IT people ask me what I do, I say “I work with computers”. If more technical people, or people from the company, but outside my group, ask what I do, I reply “I work with Linux”. I never say I’m a Perl programmer or a Perl developer. That’s like a surgeon saying “I handle knives”. -- Abigail, who is best known as a Perl programmer, 2004-06-04, 13:40 UTC, in a PerlMonks meditation on the subject, “what do you call yourselves (professionally) and more importantly, why?” % To understand control’s real role, you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects: Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million. Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million. What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all important for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value. -- Tom DeMarco, in “Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?”, in IEEE Software, July/August 2009, pp.96-95 % My Google-Fu is only a reflection of my meager superpower: I appear to be much more stubborn than the average hacker. I don't write code nearly as well as I beat other code into submission — mediating, if you will. I am very impressed with from-scratch coding work in others, but when it comes to, "Goddamnit, there should be a way to open a closeable window from Flash," that's when I've seen other great devs throw up their hands, and I still pull something out. -- Rohit Khare, 2009-09-02, in a chat. % Sometimes it seems like the entire project of contemporary moral philosophy is to work out a set of first principles from which the conventional opinions of the late 20th century English-speaking liberal middle class can be derived by logic alone. -- Lemuel Pitkin, 2009-11-21, commenting on a Crooked Timber blog post about moral philosophy, at % It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction. -- Clay Shirky, 2010-01-15, in the blog post "A Rant About Women" % No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. -- Steve Jobs, 2005-06-15, in a commencement address to the Stanford graduating class % Procrastination is the denial of death. ... You have a limited time you are allotted in this existence. Thinking you can put things off is pretending you will not die. Because your time is limited, you need to maximize your value, whether that is in productivity or hedonism or what have you. This is your one chance to live your life the way you want to do it, so don't do it to the beat of anyone else's drum or think that you can get started on the rest of your life tomorrow. Today is the only time you have. -- "ema_nymton", on Reddit, 2010-02-26, about what they learned in prison % What is really remarkable is that by using the questionable “we”, he identifies himself with St Paul, Hegel, Lenin, and Nietzsche, and from the lofty eminence of their grandeur looks down disdainfully upon the bevy of women who make bold to converse with him on a footing of equality. -- Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex (1949), brilliantly riposting a common rhetorical maneuver % Programming is not just an act of telling a computer what to do: it is also an act of telling other programmers what you wished the computer to do. Both are important, and the latter deserves care. -- Andrew Morton, commenting on an inadequately-commented patch for Linux, on the linux-mm mailing list, in message-ID <20120313144705.020b6dde.akpm@linux-foundation.org>, on 2012-03-13; hat tip to Bernie Innocenti and Jon Corbet of LWN % I think writing the world economy's backplane in the C macro assembler may have been the wrong decision. But... it sure has been a lot of fun. -- Paul Vixie, 2019-02-16, in a private conversation % Dünyada her şey için, maddiyat için, maneviyat için, hayat için, başarı için en hakiki yol gösterici ilimdir, fendir. İlim ve fennin dışında yol gösterici aramak gaflettir, cahilliktir, doğru yoldan sapmaktır. (“For everything in the world, for what is material, for what is spiritual, for life, and for success, the truest guide is learning, science. Guidance outside learning and science means heedlessness, ignorance, and deviation from the true path.") -- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; Turkish Wikiquote cites "Atatürkçülük, I. Cilt, Genelkurmay Başkanlığı, Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1984, s. 283." Various versions of the quote are in circulation.