FORTRAN -- ``the infantile disorder'' --, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I -- ``the fatal disease'' -- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
E.W.Dijkstra, 18th June 1975. Perl did not exist at the time.
The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change. -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
The resulting type and value of an instance of use of the new value notation is determined by the value (and the type of the value) finally assigned to the distinguished local reference identified by the keyword VALUE, according to the processing of the macrodefinition for the new type notation followed by that for the new value notation. -- ISO 8824:1988, Annex A
[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript. -- Jamie Zawinski
The notion that everything is a stream of bytes is utterly braindead.
The notion that regexps are the solution to all problems is equally
braindead.
Just like Perl.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use
regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems. -- Jamie Zawinski
Let's talk about why an integration of emacs and Applesoft Basic is hard/impossible/cumbersome instead. -- Jamie Zawinski, on integrating Perl with Emacs
Perl combines all of the worst aspects of BASIC, C and line noise. -- Keith Packard
For example, what's the difference between these:
time /3 ;#/; print "hello";
sin /3 ;#/; print "goodbye";
Right. The first one is time divided by 3, and the
print is in a comment. The second one is the sin of the
result of a regular expression match for 3 ;#, and the
print gets executed! -- Randal L. Schwartz
I saw `cout' being shifted "Hello world" times to the left and stopped right there. -- Steve Gonedes
Object-oriented. A characteristic of a graphical user-interface. It means that you command the computer by working with on-screen objects rather than issuing written commands. -- Consumer Reports, September 1993
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not actually tried it. -- Donald Knuth
The fact that it works is immaterial. -- L. Ogborn
And then I realized that it never should have worked in the first place. Thus, it would not work again until rewritten. -- Anon.
I then empirically found that I had to scale by -1 in x instead of in z, and also to scale the xa and xf values by -1. (Basically I just put in enough minus signs after the fact to make it work.) Al Barr refers to this technique as ``making sure you have made an even number of sign errors.'' -- Jim Blinn, A Trip Down The Graphics Pipeline, p. 73
Yes. It is an art. Look at the concept of the B+ tree. Isn't it beautiful? You've got to admire it. But hey -- if you indeed manage to admire it, you're risking to become a hacker. It can be the first step. Admire B+ trees only if you know what you are doing. -- mawa
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons. -- Popular Mechanics, March 1949
I think there is a world market for about five computers. -- Thomas J. Watson Sr., Chairman of the Board at IBM, 1943.
All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. -- IBM maintenance manual, 1925
One disadvantage of the Univac system is that it does not use Unix, a recently developed program which translates from one computer language to another and has a built-in editing system which identifies errors in the original program. -- The Diamondback, 3 March 1987
The Trojan horse strategy is used in many attempts to defeat the security of a UN*X brand operating system installation. The following scenario is typical: The UN*X brand operating administrator arrives at work one afternoon and finds a new terminal outside the system security area. Since it is better than the current system console, he brings it in to the computer. After a few minutes of use, hordes of cockroaches come pouring out of the back of the terminal, driven out by the heat. The operator jumps up to stamp them out and the intruder has his will with the system. -- Peter E. Yee
I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act. -- Ken Pier, Xerox PARC
AS OF THIS WRITING, NETWORK UNIX HAS BEEN RUNNING ON A FULL TIME BASIS FOR ABOUT FOUR WEEKS. DURING THAT PERIOD, THERE WERE BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR CRASHES A DAY. THIS IS NOT A VALID INDICATOR BECAUSE MANY OF THE FAILURES WERE DUE TO HARDWARE COMPLICATIONS. MORE RECENTLY THE HARDWARE HAS BEEN RE-CONFIGURED TO IMPROVE RELIABILITY AND THE CRASH RATE HAS BEEN REDUCED TO ONE A DAY WITH A DOWN TIME OF 2-3 MINS. THIS IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE
(RFC 681, 14 May 1975)
The number of Unix installations has grown to 10, with more expected. -- Unix Manual, 2nd ed., 1972.
The different versions of the UN*X brand operating system are numbered in a logical sequence: 5, 6, 7, 2, 2.9, 3, 4.0, III, 4.1, V, 4.2, V.2, and 4.3. -- Alan Filipski
While programs written for Sun machines won't run unmodified on Intel-based computers, Sun said the two packages will be completely compatible and that software companies can convert a program from one system to the other through a fairly straightforward and automated process known as ``recompiling.'' -- San Jose Mercury News
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. -- Anon.
I have to say that time has shown that Stallman's stubborness on several points has been vindicated. He's been right a lot more than he's been wrong. -- Mark Crispin
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY ERASE IS BACKSPACE -- Richard Stallman
They accused me of costing them millions of dollars. I hope it's true. -- Richard M. Stallman
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly: ``You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.'' Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.
A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to Greenblatt. As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by. ``Is it true,'' asked the student, ``that PL-1 has many of the same data types as Lisp?'' Almost before the student had finished his question, Greenblatt shouted, ``FOO!'', and hit the student with a stick.
One day a student came to Moon and said: ``I understand how to make
a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the
pointers to each cons.''
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
``One day a student came to Moon and said: `I understand how to make a
better garbage collector...' ''
Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
The Lesser-Known Programming Languages #12: LITHP
This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence
of an S in its character set; users must substitute
TH. LITHP is said to be useful in protheththing lithtth.
Windows NT 5.0 is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, release of the Windows NT operating system. While there are important new features in this release, version 5.0 will build on a proven system architecture and incorporate tens of thousands of bug fixes from version 4.0. -- from the Microsoft web site
Outlook Express generates certificates which not only use the GeneralizedTime encoding more than 50 years before they're allowed to, but give the resulting certificate an expiry date in the early 17th century. A Microsoft spokesman has confirmed that this is deliberate, and not a bug. -- Peter Gutmann
Most of you steal your software. One thing you do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? -- William H. Gates Jr.
...new storage management features such as disk quotas... -- from the Microsoft Windows NT 5.0 Beta press release
``His questions and approach are different,'' says Tod Nielsen, Microsoft's general manager for developer relations. ``He asks, `How are we going to make sure that this is sound from an architectural perspective?' Historically, at Microsoft it's been `Look, this works.' '' -- The Wall Street Journal, 4 Feb. 1999, on Jim Allchin.
The obvious mathematical breakthrough [to break modern encryption] would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. -- Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, p. 265.
These download files are in Microsoft Word 6.0 format. After unzipping, these files can be viewed in any text editor, including all versions of Microsoft Word, WordPad, and Microsoft Word Viewer. -- from the Microsoft web site
Imagine that CRAY decides to make a personal computer. It contains 16
Alpha based processors executing in parallel, has 800 megabytes of RAM,
100 Gigabytes of disk storage, a resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, does
24bit 3D graphics in realtime, relies entirely on voice recognition for
input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What is the first
question the computer community asks?
``Is it DOS compatible?''
The Internet, of course, is more than just a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs. -- Time Magazine, 3 July 1995
SCSI is not magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then. -- Anon.
Part of this is due to the fact that AMS is at the top of the Andrew pyramid: by the time you run Messages, the multimedia mail-reading interface, you are running a large application program that includes all of the AFS, ATK, and X11 libraries in addition to the AMS code itself. The result is a program that, when running, often grows to occupy 2 or 3 megabytes of memory, and sometimes more. -- Nathaniel S. Borenstein, CMU's Andrew Project: A Retrospective.
Bytes 2-3: An arbitrary but carefully chosen number (42). -- TIFF 6.0 specification.