Informatics

🇺🇸Randy Pausch

Education

1960–2008

"And be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity."

🇺🇸Newton Lee

Literature

"Human-machine symbiosis goes beyond sexbots to develop empathy and relationship."

🇩🇰Bjarne Stroustrup

Science

b. 1950

"An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only."

🇩🇪Joscha Bach

Philosophy

b. 1973

"Long ago, physics and other natural sciences... had become computational."

🇺🇸Richard Hamming

Mathematics

1915–1998

"We constantly use the word "simplify", but its meaning depends on what you are going to do next, and there is no uniform definition."

🇨🇳Robin Li

Technology

b. 1968

"I think it's much severe than what you have experienced in the past year or two for the general economic situation."

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Science

1930–2002

"The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible."

🇨🇦Brian Kernighan

Literature

b. 1942

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

🇺🇸Eliezer Yudkowsky

Literature

effective altruism

b. 1979

"There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model."

🇺🇸Fred Brooks

Science

1931–2022

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."

"While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static."

🇺🇸Gordon Bell

Technology

1934–2024

"A Broadband Cable for TV is like a sewer pipe that in principle can carry gas, water, and waste: it is easy to get all that shit in there, but hard to separate it out again."

🇺🇸Hal Abelson

Technology

b. 1947

"Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization."

🇬🇧Maurice Wilkes

Mathematics

1913–2010

"M. V. Wilkes Bibliography at University of Cambridge website"

🇸🇪Ivar Jacobson

Science

b. 1939

"A is a complete course of events in the system, seen from a user’s perspective."

🇺🇸Terry Winograd

Philosophy

b. 1946

"There is a tendency to throw computers at third world problems, which I think is often a distraction. Putting computers in the schools is great, but it may be more important to put teachers in the schools."

🇺🇸Douglas Engelbart

Technology

1925–2013

"The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better."

🇺🇸Rudy Rucker

Science

b. 1946

"I had formed a vague idea that the sex sphere was a hypersphere extending into the fourth dimension. Which meant that if the sphere's giant cunt swallowed me I could end up somewhere very . . . different."

🇨🇭Niklaus Wirth

Science

1934–2024

"Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples."