Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Guy Steele

Quote by Guy Steele

“There's a story about how the program is organized, there's a story about the context in which the program is expected to operate. And one would hope that there will be something about the program, whether it's block comments at the start of each routine or an overview document that comes separately or just choices of variable names that will somehow convey those stories to you.”

Quote by Guy Steele

Author

Guy Steele
Guy Steele

Guy Steele (born October 2, 1954) is an American computer scientist known for his pioneering work in programming language design and parallel computing. He co-designed the Scheme programming language, contributed to the Common Lisp standard, and was a key author of the Java Language Specification. Steele earned his bachelor's degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He has worked at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Tartan Labs, Thinking Machines, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and an ACM Fellow, Steele has received numerous awards for his contributions to programming languages and compiler optimization. His work has profoundly influenced functional programming and parallel computing paradigms. more

You May Also Like

“We weren’t trying to strike it rich with Firefox. It’s open source and it’s free. We weren’t trying to take over the world; we had kind of modest goals, and it was OK if it failed. We were a lot freer to make risky decisions. If you can afford to do things that way, it’s just so much better. You’re not thinking about venture capitalists or marketing or sales. Just product and users, all day every day.”

“I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.”

“Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.”