Richard Hamming on Technology
Browse 5 quotations attributed to Richard Hamming, catalogued under technology, with dates where available.
This page displays 5 quotations attributed to Richard Hamming and filed under "technology" in QuoteLineage. The selection is ordered by stored importance and quality scores, not citation counts. A topic label describes how an entry is catalogued; it does not establish the theme's importance in the author's work.
Attributed to Richard Hamming, entry #131709: "Without real experience in using the computer to get useful results the computer science major is apt to know all about the marvelous tool except how to use it. Such a person is a…"
Attributed to Richard Hamming, entry #42161: "This is the type of AI I am interested in—what can the human and machine do together, and not in the competition which can arise. ...There are doubts as to what fraction of the po…"
5 Quotes by Richard Hamming on Technology
"Without real experience in using the computer to get useful results the computer science major is apt to know all about the marvelous tool except how to use it. Such a person is a mere technician, skilled in manipulating the tool but with little sense of how and when to use it for its basic purposes."
"This is the type of AI I am interested in—what can the human and machine do together, and not in the competition which can arise. ...There are doubts as to what fraction of the population can compete with computers, even with nice interactive prompting menus."
"Unfortunately... the ADA language was designed by experts, and it shows all the non-humane features you can expect from them. It is... a typical Computer Science hacking job—do not try and understand what you are doing, just get it running. As a result of this poor psychological design... although a government contract may specify the programming be in ADA, probably over 90% will be done in FORTRAN, debugged, tested, and then painfully, by hand, be converted to a poor ADA program, with a high probability of errors!"
"Indeed, one of my major complaints about the computer field is that whereas Newton could say, "If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," I am forced to say, "Today we stand on each other's feet." Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way. Science is supposed to be cumulative, not almost endless duplication of the same kind of things."
"Somewhere in the mid-to-late 1950s in an address to the President and V.Ps of Bell Laboratories I said, "At present we are doing 1 out of 10 experiments on the computers and 9 in the labs, but before I leave it will be 9 out of 10 on the machines". They did not believe me... by now we do somewhere between 90% to 99% on the machines... And this trend will go on!"