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Learning Quotes

“Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.”

“The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology-the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects.”

“We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail.”

“I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.”

“The important point is that the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. Sure, any given feature list can be implemented, given enough coding time. But in addition to coming out late, you will usually wind up with a codebase that is so fragile that new ideas that should be dead-simple wind up taking longer and longer to work into the tangled existing web. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.”

“A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.”

“Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that 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.”

“Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems.”

“Text is linear; it is black and white; it doesn't zoom around the page in 3-D; it isn't intelligent by itself; in fact, in terms of immediate reaction it is quite boring. I can't imagine a single preliterate was ever wowed at the first sight of text, and yet text has been the basis of arguably the most fundamental intellectual transformation of the human species. It and its subforms, such as algebra, have made science education for all a plausible goal.”

“In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work.”

“Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.”

“Incidentally, when we're faced with a "prove or disprove," we're usually better off trying first to disprove with a counterexample, for two reasons: A disproof is potentially easier (we need just one counterexample); and nitpicking arouses our creative juices. Even if the given assertion is true, our search for a counterexample often leads to a proof, as soon as we see why a counterexample is impossible. Besides, it's healthy to be skeptical.”

“It's [programming] the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.”

“In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore, for the time being, their differences.”

“What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? What is the linking thread which gathers these disparate branches into a single discipline. My answer to these questions is simple -it is the art of programming a computer. It is the art of designing efficient and elegant methods of getting a computer to solve problems, theoretical or practical, small or large, simple or complex. It is the art of translating this design into an effective and accurate computer program.”

“To treat programming scientifically, it must be possible to specify the required properties of programs precisely. Formality is certainly not an end in itself. The importance of formal specifications must ultimately rest in their utility -in whether or not they are used to improve the quality of software or to reduce the cost of producing and maintaining software.”

“If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them, and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details.”