Data Structures Quotes

The key to a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms is not an exhaustive survey of every conceivable data structure and its subforms, with memorization of each's Big-O value and amortized cost. ~ Robert Love

Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don't understand the physics of software and it's rarely, if ever, taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages, and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, and throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people. Specifically, it's about our limitations when it comes to complexity and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces. This is the science of programming: make building blocks that people can understand and use easily, and people will work together to solve the very largest problems. ~ Pieter Hintjens

If she doesn't learn about data structures at home, she'll just learn about it on the streets." Sandra laughed. This was Greg's stock answer for all the age-inappropriate activities he tried to teach the kids. Most of them were odd, but benign, like computer programming. However some - like coaching them to win every argument by declaring, That sounds like something Hitler would say -were much less benign. ~ Penny Reid

Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming. ~ Rob Pike

Compassion is what you're good at. I'm better at complex searches through organized data structures. ~ Orson Scott Card

The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures. ~ Fred Brooks

The complement is also true: Procedural code makes it hard to add new data structures because all the functions must change. OO code makes it hard to add new functions because all the classes must change. ~ Robert C. Martin

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. ~ Eric S. Raymond

Database Management System [Origin: Data + Latin basus "low, mean, vile, menial, degrading, ounterfeit."] A complex set of interrelational data structures allowing data to be lost in many convenient sequences while retaining a complete record of the logical relations between the missing items.
From The Devil's DP Dictionary ~ Stan Kelly-Bootle

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. ~ Linus Torvalds

Realize you won't master data structures until you are working on a real-world problem and discover that a hash is the solution to your performance woes. ~ Robert Love

He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit. ~ Charles Yu

By some estimates, the data-storage curve is rocketing upward at the rate of 800 percent per year. Organizations are collecting so much data they're overwhelmed. Families are no different; we have more things on disk, more photos, more items stored than we'll ever have to allocate time for. "Since Kodachrome made way for jpeg, pictures accumulate on hard drives like wet leaves in a gutter." (Jim Lewis, author of "The King is Dead") ~ Jeff Davidson

While it's wonderful that investors have access to all the data now available to them, it has become a full-time job to sift through it and separate out the valuable news from the useless noise. ~ Maria Bartiromo

If you don't come home with data, you've done nothing. ~ William Stone

Keep your app simple, keep your data simple, and keep your interactions with other systems simple, and you will stand a much better chance of achieving great performance for your app. ~ Anonymous

The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo. ~ Andre Michel Lwoff

When you analyze all the data, there is a warming trend according to science. But the jury is out on the degree of how much is manmade. ~ Rob Portman

For those parents from lower-class and minority communities[who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements. ~ Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

To know we are being spied on by our own government, and to have someone else's government collaborating on that, to know that data storage is so cheap your information can be kept for years and used to create any kind of story, to me that's a grave attack on human rights. ~ Sara Harrison

As long as research data is stored as tacit knowledge in people's minds or buried in interview transcripts, teams will experience difficulty synthesizing what has been observed and learned. ~ Bella Martin

possibilities of our nature. Instead of reflecting first, we sometimes rush into thoughtless action. Instead of making a reflective, seriously intended, self-committing choice, we sometimes prefer to follow the line of least resistance and to drift lazily along, long-term consequences be damned. The entire environmental movement is based on these propositions. If it is not constituted by study groups, inquiries, data collection, publications, warnings and alarms, consciousness raising, propaganda, education, and political action campaigns designed, at a minimum, to raise public awareness, what is the environmental movement? If it is not concerned ~ Ronald Bailey

A feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can. ~ Lauren Groff

The role of smart, radical activists is to encourage, protract, organize, and multiply the chipping away not only at the mythology of presumed supremacy, but at power and its social and physical infrastructure. To find weak points within scriptures and structures of the system, as one might examine an old block wall before demolition, seeking out crumbling mortar lines and cracked blocks. Then, to strike, and recruit more help - more and more - and strike, and strike, and bring it down. ~ Michael Carter

In competition, everything is very well planned in advance and very well detailed. You just stick to the plan, keep your head down and be as disciplined as possible in every aspect, whether sleep, recovery or the intensity of your training. And it's all recorded; the data is analysed. ~ Victoria Pendleton

Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions - such as China, Vietnam, and Iran - look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria. ~ Pankaj Mishra

If you are born in 1564, your dislocation from your parents' experience is very profound. You are the first generation who will have had all your religious experience in English, the first to have a countryman circumnavigate the globe. All the power and economic structures of the world are changing around you. ~ Neil MacGregor

We cannot incarcerate ourselves out of addiction. Addiction is a medical crisis that - when it comes to nonviolent offenders - warrants medical interventions, not incarceration. Decades later, data unequivocally illustrates that this war has been a massive failure. It has not only failed to reduce violent crime, but arrest rates - throughout its tenure - have continuously ascended even when crime rates have descended. ~ Dominique DuBois Gilliard

The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort. ~ Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

There are many who subscribe to the convention that service is a business cost, but our data demonstrates that superior service is an investment that can help drive business growth. Investing in quality talent, and ensuring they have the skills, training and tools that enable them to empathize and actively listen to customers are central to providing consistently excellent service experiences. ~ Jim Bush

For a thirty-day period ending in February 2013, one unit of the NSA collected more than three billion pieces of communication data from US communication systems ~ Glenn Greenwald

We've got to use every piece of data and piece of information, and hopefully that will help us be accurate with our player evaluation. For us, that's our life blood. ~ Billy Beane

Data is your Beta... ~ Kshitij Bhatia

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!" ... ~ David Byrne

I still have trouble identifying grammatical structures by name, though I know them as matters of usage. ~ Robertson Davies

Data coming out our ears but we lack narrative. ~ Roy Sekoff

Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions. ~ Sean Carroll

It is no coincidence then that doctors and patients and the entire Lyme community report - anecdotally, of course, as there is still a frustrating scarcity of good data on anything Lyme-related - that women suffer the most from Lyme. They tend to advance into chronic and late-stage forms of the illness most because often it's checked for last, as doctors often treat them as psychiatric cases first. The nebulous symptoms plus the fracturing of articulacy and cognitive fog can cause any Lyme patient to simply appear mentally ill and mentally ill only. This is why we hear that young women - again, anecdotally - are dying of Lyme the fastest. This is also why we hear that chronic illness is a women's burden. Women simply aren't allowed to be physically sick until they are mentally sick, too, and then it is by some miracle or accident that the two can be separated for proper diagnosis. In the end, every Lyme patient has some psychiatric diagnosis, too, if anything because of the hell it takes getting to a diagnosis. ~ Porochista Khakpour

We are creators in the process of our own evolution. In this way, we are gods in our own universe. Self evolving gods, learning and expanding and interacting with a perpetual stream of incoming data ~ Ruben Papian

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. ~ Zadie Smith

I mean, take for instance all this civil liberties crap. You know what I'd do if I were in power again? I'd say, okay then, we'll have two queues at the airports. On the left, we'll have queues to flights on which we've done no background checks on the passengers, no profiling, no biometric data, nothing that infringed anyone's precious civil liberties, used no intelligence obtained under torture - nothing. On the right, we'll have queues to the flights where we've done everything possible to make them safe for passengers. Then people can make their own minds up which plane they want to catch. Wouldn't that be great? To sit back and watch which queue the Rycarts of this world would really choose to put their kids on, if the chips were down? ~ Robert Harris

Gardeners often focus exclusively on plants, missing the absolutely essential visual role played by structures, from paths to pavilions. ~ Janet Macunovich

Humans and other organics were dangerously error-prone in so many ways: They somehow failed to see or hear important stimuli, insisted on ignoring data they didn't like, and forgot things they desperately needed to remember. Any self-respecting droid would have addressed such failings with a quick diagnostics session and memory defragmentation.
Yet organics made up for this - at least a little bit - with a talent for tackling a problem with simultaneous bits and pieces of multiple subroutines at once, what they called improvisation. ~ Jason Fry

We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

This argument [that life is too improbable to have arisen by chance] comes up repeatedly: its latest manifestation is Hoyle's discussion of the likelihood of a wind blowing through a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 [sic]. What is wrong with it? Essentially, it is that no biologist imagines that complex structures arise in a single step. ~ John Maynard Smith

The existence of matter and energy in the universe did not require the violation of energy conservation at the assumed creation. In fact, the data strongly support the hypothesis that no such miracle occurred. If we regard such a miracle as predicted by the creator hypothesis, then the prediction is not confirmed. ~ Victor J. Stenger

Engineering, I think you can pick up. [A data scientist's] curiosity is built-in ~ Scott Nicholson

There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski. ~ James R Newman

Staff will need to receive adequate training from IT staff on ways to effectively use databases. Beyond the ability to navigate a database system, staff will need additional skills such as developing queries or using spreadsheets to analyze and present data. In other words, rather than simply concentrating on the business functions that technology supports, student affairs staff should integrate assessment functions into their understanding of technology tools. ~ John H. Schuh

I've always been amazed at the vastness of America itself and what it does and how it does it. I'm interested in the mechanics of what makes this country happen, the power structures, the natural splendor. ~ Michael Light