Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
The best practice is inspired by theory.
The best theory is inspired by practice.
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
It is much more rewarding to do more with less.
How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science.
Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.
Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.
Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.
I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.
The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.
I have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.
We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
Meta-design is much more difficult than design; it's easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.
The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler
The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.
Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.
By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.
In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.
[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.
Email is a wonderful thing for those people whose role in life is to be on top of things, but not for me: my role is to be on the bottom of things.
The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.
I can't be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It's at that level.
The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.
Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.
My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.
I'll never know everything. My life would be a lot worse if there was nothing I knew the answers about - and if there was nothing I didn't know the answers about.
In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.
I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.