Computer Science Quotes

I considered law and math. My Dad was a lawyer. I think though I would have ended up in physics if I didn't end up in computer science. ~ Bill Gates

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity. ~ Tony Hoare

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn't going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I've ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn't want to do whatever he did. ~ J. Cole

When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night. ~ Marissa Mayer

The computer only gives back ourselves. It is a faithful mirror that reflects the human traits that are brought to it. ~ William Barrett

I like to think of it as this new field. Instead of computer science, it's going to be virtual science. ~ Brendan Iribe

What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months. ~ Fred Brooks

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again - making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. [ ... ] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. ~ Neal Stephenson

The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information. ~ Alan J. Perlis

Q: Why bother doing proofs about programming languages? They are almost always boring if the definitions are right.
A: The definitions are almost always wrong.

- Anonymous ~ Benjamin C. Pierce

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. ~ Steve Jobs

Error processing is turning out to be one of the thorniest problems of modern computer science, and you can't afford to deal with it haphazardly. Some people have estimated that as much as 90 percent of a program's code is written for exceptional, error-processing cases or housekeeping, implying that only 10 percent is written for nominal cases (Shaw in Bentley 1982). With so much code dedicated to handling errors, a strategy for handling them consistently should be spelled out in the architecture. ~ Steve McConnell

jQuery is by far the most widely used library for JavaScript. It is used on more than 50% of websites. Many frameworks, such as Backbone and Twitter's Bootstrap, are built on top of jQuery. Being able to extend and write plugins for jQuery can not only save lots of time, but also makes code much cleaner and easier to maintain. ~ Robert Duchnik

I occasionally find myself debating with computer science colleagues whether work on the more applied side can form the basis for good academic computing research. In my view, it clearly can, as long as it yields something sufficiently novel and important concerning computing. ~ Paul S. Rosenbloom

Computer science is the most misunderstood field there is. You are being paid to solve puzzles. For a person who has practiced meditation in past lives, that is the way your mind works. ~ Frederick Lenz

Coding is today's language of creativity. All our children deserve a chance to become creators instead consumers of computer science. ~ Maria Klawe

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Computer science really involves the same mindset, particularly artificial intelligence. ~ Frederick Lenz

My brother is an electrical engineer and went to computer science grad school at Stanford, and he'd tell me stories about the happy hours he'd organize. ~ Alec Berg

The company I invested in is probably a leader in that area. They're a company called Second Spectrum, which happens to be based in LA but was started by two USC computer-science professors. It's filled with guys who love sports, who played sports, but really look like programmers. ~ Steve Ballmer

Suppose whatever we can recognize we can find. We can if P=NP. ~ Lance Fortnow

But biology and computer science - life and computation - are related. I am confident that at their interface great discoveries await those who seek them. ~ Leonard Adleman

[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes ... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. ~ Hal Abelson

There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion. ~ Hal Abelson

Throughout my academic career, I'd given some pretty good talks. But being considered the best speaker in the computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs. ~ Randy Pausch

In the end, it all comes down to 0 and 1 ~ Vineet Goel

In my experience, requirements change quite often, or new situations will arise that weren't anticipated at the start of the project. If the situation can be addressed with a plugin, I just whip open the standalone plugin page, make the updates and pop the new plugin back in. Because the plugin is self-contained, it's easy to recreate the problem, fix it, and get it back into the codebase. ~ Robert Duchnik

I think the combination of graduate education in a field like Computer Science and the opportunity to apply this in a work environment like Microsoft is what drove me. The impact these opportunities create can lead to work that has broad, worldwide impact. ~ Satya Nadella

You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have. ~ Cory Althoff

[A]s a species, we are very poor at programming. Our brains are built to understand other humans, not computers. We're terrible at forcing our minds into the precise modes of thought needed to interact with a computer, and we consistently make errors when we try. That's why computer science and programming degrees take such time and dedication to acquire: we are literally learning how to speak to an alien mind, of a kind that has not existed on Earth until very recently. ~ Stuart Armstrong

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science. ~ Donald Knuth

An algorithm must be seen to be believed. ~ Donald Ervin Knuth

meantime, here is a list of degrees for five of the nerdiest writers: J. STEWART BURNS BS Mathematics, Harvard University MS Mathematics, UC Berkeley DAVID S. COHEN BS Physics, Harvard University MS Computer Science, UC Berkeley AL JEAN BS Mathematics, Harvard University KEN KEELER BS Applied Mathematics, Harvard University PhD Applied Mathematics, Harvard University JEFF WESTBROOK BS Physics, Harvard University PhD Computer Science, Princeton University ~ Simon Singh

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. ~ Donald Ervin Knuth

As you study computer science you develop this wonderful mental acumen, particularly with relational databases, systems analysis, and artificial intelligence. ~ Frederick Lenz

the mind is a neural computer ~ Steven Pinker

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face. ~ Brian Christian

Computer science doesn't know how to build complex systems that work reliably. This has been a well-understood problem since the very beginning of programmable computers. ~ Matt Blaze

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. ~ Leon Bambrick

Reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly. The more I use a piece of code, the more confident and familiar I become with it, which in turn significantly speeds up my development time. ~ Robert Duchnik

What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? What is the linking thread which gathers these disparate branches into a single discipline. My answer to these questions is simple -it is the art of programming a computer. It is the art of designing efficient and elegant methods of getting a computer to solve problems, theoretical or practical, small or large, simple or complex. It is the art of translating this design into an effective and accurate computer program. ~ Tony Hoare

Generating a system architecture is not a deterministic process. It requires careful consideration of business requirements, technology choices, existing infrastructure and systems, and actual physical resources, such as budget and manpower. ~ Andrew Holdsworth

This is a global fight to get the right people in the right place and we're talking about people with PhDs in engineering, computer science, mathematics. ~ Jerry Moran

The logical and extralogical exercises you do in meditation are very similar to advanced systems analysis and programming. ~ Frederick Lenz

I was on this path to becoming a computer-science guy, but I didn't like it. I got no joy from it. It was very, very scary. It was suffocating to think that I was just going to do this thing for the rest of my life. ~ Kumail Nanjiani

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education. ~ Melinda Gates

Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out. ~ Jaron Lanier

It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak. ~ Guy Debord

A system of logical instructions that an automaton can carry out and which causes the automaton to perform some organized task is called a code. ~ John Von Neumann

Tests are stories we tell the next generation of programmers on a project. ~ Roy Osherove

I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college. ~ Watt Key

Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing. ~ Stan Kelly-Bootle

I've actually started a number of businesses in my career. So I'm 28 currently, but when I was about 16, I started building Websites, and that's how I put myself through school. I went to Duke with a degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, and then to Princeton. ~ Aaron Patzer

Until Systers came into existence, the notion of a global 'community of women in computer science' did not exist. ~ Anita Borg

What use could the humanities be in a digital age? University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents' nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world. ~ Nicholas Kristof

Computer science increasingly relies on its private corporate patrons who apply their own closed systems of peer review and criticism, with occasional results thrown over the wall. The closed walls of Redmond or Mountain View enable old-fashioned patronage of nature's secrets. The objectivity and scientific status of computer science is a chimera: we cannot stand on the shoulders of giants in computer science, for they simply refuse to let us. ~ Samir Chopra

For those who wish to stay and work in computer science or technology, fields badly in need of their services, let's roll out the welcome mat. ~ Sheldon Adelson

The clarity offered by software as metaphor - and the empowerment allegedly offered to us who know software - should make us pause, because software also engenders a sense of profound ignorance. Software is extremely difficult to comprehend. Who really knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? Who completely understands what one's computer is actually doing at any given moment? Software as a metaphor for metaphor troubles the usual functioning of metaphor, that is, the clarification of an unknown concept through a known one. For, if software illuminates an unknown, it does so through an unknowable (software). This paradox - this drive to grasp what we do not know through what we do not entirely understand… does not undermine, but rather grounds software's appeal. Its combination of what can be seen and not seen, can be known and no known - it's separation of interface from algorithm, of software from hardware - makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture. Every use entails an act of faith. ~ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology. ~ Charles Petzold

It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence. ~ Alan Turing

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you'd need to be the chairman of MIT's computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. "By 2020, a chip with today's processing power will cost about a penny," CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 "which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries - cell phone, Internet - that we all seem to take for granted. ~ Peter H. Diamandis

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation. ~ Steve Ballmer

The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world-the hardware-plays the role of a gigantic computer. ~ Paul Davies

As a Facebook summer intern once told me, In my school's computer science department, there are more Daves than girls. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, has launched a movement to convince people to not go to college.3 It's a waste of money. The return on investment isn't there anymore. School has gotten too expensive. . . If writing [computer] code is your deal and you're able to go to a trade school that enables you to write code, that's far better than a computer science degree from a four-year college or university that looks great on paper, but doesn't give you the skills you need when you graduate. ~ John Dearie

I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500. ~ Donald Knuth

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. ~ Dennis M. Ritchie

The most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over the course of the Computer Center's life, thousands of students passed ~ Malcolm Gladwell

really a hedge fund but a versatile technology laboratory full of innovators and talented engineers who could apply computer science to a variety of different problems.5 Investing was only the first ~ Brad Stone

Ultimately, I try to think of my application's main codebase as just stringing together various components and code from many sources. It just controls logic and flow. The real nitty-gritty is handled behind the scenes. This is why frameworks like Backbone are so important - they hide a lot of the details in the background and allow you to just focus on the flow and control of your application. ~ Robert Duchnik

Persons with Disability (PWD), Ex-Serviceman (XSM), Kashmiri Migrant (KM). Please refer to the Norms for the same. There are 394 vacancies for the above position (200 Electronics, 120 Mechanical, 57 Computer Science, ~ Anonymous

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random ~ Donald Knuth

Theoretical Computer Science is just as useless as everything we mathematicians do. ~ Jennifer Tour Chayes

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer. ~ Alan Perlis

Artificial intelligence will not destroy this planet, irresponsible human intelligence will. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Science is supposedly the method by which we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. In computer science, we all are standing on each others' feet. ~ Gerald J. Popek

There is no problem in computer science that can't be solved using another level of indirection. But that usually will create another problem. ~ David Wheeler

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it. ~ William C. Brown

A good standalone plugin can also make you a fair amount of money. Many developers make a decent living by simply maintaining and updating one or two crucial plugins that are far better than anything available for free. ~ Robert Duchnik

The silicon microchips themselves might be cheap (relative to times past, anyway), but CPU cycles are not cheap. Every CPU cycle consumes clock time. Clock time is latency. A wasteful application makes its users wait longer than they need to, and if there's anything users hate, it's waiting. For web systems, latency in the application has a dual effect. The added processing directly increases the burden on the application servers themselves. Suppose that an application takes just 250 milliseconds of extra processing per transaction. If the system processes a million transactions a day, that extra 250 milliseconds per transaction makes for an extra 69.4 hours of compute time every day. Assuming an 80% load factor on each server, you'll need four additional servers to handle this load. ~ Michael T. Nygard

Computer science is fascinating. As you study computer science, you will find that you develop your mind. It is literally like doing Buddhist exercises all day long. ~ Frederick Lenz

I wanted to make an explicitly educational comic that taught readers the concepts I covered in my introductory programming class. That's what 'Secret Coders' is. It's both a fun story about a group of tweens who discover a secret coding school, and an explanation of some foundational ideas in computer science. ~ Gene Luen Yang

Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination. ~ Graham Moore

Most papers in computer science describe how their author learned what someone else already knew. ~ Peter Landin

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras. ~ Alan Kay

In the U.S. there are two types of hipsters: those who know how to program and those who serve coffee. ~ Cesar Hidalgo

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. ~ Donald Knuth

The truth is that computer science is not really about the computer. It is just a tool to help you see ideas more clearly. ~ Carlos Bueno

I have yet to see a career that is similar in benefit as computer science for doing the advanced exercises. ~ Frederick Lenz

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students. ~ Alan Perlis

! want to leverage the creativity of researchers across mathematics, statistics, data mining, computer science, biology, medicine, and the public at large. ~ Tan Le

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it. ~ Richard Stallman

My background is in tech. I studied computer science, and was working on TechTV, so the first thing I wanted to do was see my favorite motherboard stories hit the front page; you know, like, really geeky stuff. ~ Kevin Rose

...if you aren't, at any given time, scandalized by code you wrote five or even three years ago, you're not learning anywhere near enough ~ Nick Black

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits. ~ Kent Beck

I got more interested in the calculator than I did in the problem. ~ Fernando Corbató

He asked the class how many of us were taking computer science, and everybody but me and this one girl who didn't speak English raised their hands. ~ Ned Vizzini

It's now up to the states to figure out how they implement that definition of a well-rounded education, in other words, where they spend federal funds. The new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, has suggestions like computer science, health, foreign language and geography. So there's no guarantee the arts will now flourish. Arts advocates are ready to help states and school districts with their plans. ~ Elizabeth Blair Lee