Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp.
Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer's standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products
Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.
Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.
It's important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers.
The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.
It is only by trying new things that we can hope to create products that are original. Don't just say those words; act like you believe them.
We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge.
TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It's just a painful business to be in. It's just not necessarily how I want to spend my time.
Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy.
Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.
It doesn't even matter how successful a movie like 'Up' is: you'll never sell a lot of toy walkers. But that's the way we spread out the risk.
Once your computer is pretending to be a neural net, you get it to be able to do a particular task by just showing it a whole lot of examples.
The screen is a window through which one sees a virtual world. The challenge is to make that world look real, act real, sound real, feel real.
If we are to understand the interactions of a large number of agents, we must first be able to describe the capabilities of individual agents.
If there is to be a competition, there must be some basis for resolving it. It is also clear that the competition should be experienced based.
Looking back to data, we can see if the consequences are plausible; looking forward to theory, we can see if general principles are suggested.
It's unlikely that machines would spontaneously decide they didn't like people, or that they had goals in opposition to those of human beings.
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years-and not one of them could come near to this!
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 ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies.
However, as every parent of a small child knows, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process.
Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare.
If something works, you shouldn't do it again. We want to do something that is new, original - something where there's a good chance of failure.
From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.
Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.
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.
Human beings are under the control of a strange force that bends them in absurd ways, forcing them to play a role in a bizarre game of deception.
Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.
And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.
[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.
There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational.
It was the academic community who wired up their universities so it was put together by smart, well-meaning people who thought it was a good idea.
I believe that products should use technology to empower people of all abilities, to augment our minds and bodies, to make us better human beings.
Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
For better or worse, the people who become leaders and decision makers in politics, law and business are going to come from schools like Princeton.
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.
When I was young, it was television that was taking off, and so you had people worried that people were spending too much time watching television.
Renaming a class at one level is really easy; you just change the name. But how do you change all the references to that class and all the imports?
The name was supposed to be 'Googol,' which is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It was before the Google spellchecker existed.
I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.
I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.
In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.
It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.