Functional Programming Quotes

While functions being unable to change state is good because it helps us reason about our programs, there's one problem with that. If a function can't change anything in the world, how is it supposed to tell us what it calculated? In order to tell us what it calculated, it has to change the state of an output device (usually the state of the screen), which then emits photons that travel to our brain and change the state of our mind, man. ~ Miran Lipovaca

I'm dead, not impotent. Nasty rumors like that must be squashed before they gain momentum. Feel free to emphasize how very functional I am. ~ Rachel Vincent

Good visual layout shows the logical structure of a program. ~ Steve McConnell

A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes. ~ Hal Abelson

Twitter is so stupid. I mean, it sucks! It's not a good way to communicate and it's really difficult to use it for any functional thing. ~ Phil Elvrum

There is a construct in computer programming called 'the infinite loop' which enables a computer to do what no other physical machine can do - to operate in perpetuity without tiring. In the same way it doesn't know exhaustion, it doesn't know when it's wrong and it can keep doing the wrong thing over and over without tiring. ~ John Maeda

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive. ~ William Gibson

IF YOU DON'T FEED YOUR MIND WITH SUCCESS. IT WILL ROT WITH MEDIOCRITY! ~ BLONDEL SEUMO

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf's below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows' legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by. The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo's sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies. ~ China Mieville

I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college. ~ Masi Oka

I think that the climate within the band has changed, it's now in a more functional situation. ~ Billy Sherwood

As a kid, I was always into art at the same time as computers, and eventually I realised I was making more interesting stuff with my keyboard than with my hands. I really enjoyed modifying computer games more than playing them, so that got me into programming. ~ Aaron Koblin

Last year was the fourth or fifth attempt to get fall launched till 'American Idol' comes in January. To be honest, the reality programming we had on last year was considered filler until we could get to the good stuff. It was meant to hopefully get us to January andor to November. To get past baseball. But (it) didn't work very well. ~ Mike Darnell

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

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. ~ Alan Perlis

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. ~ Richard P. Feynman

The students in your youth ministry don't need your clever ideas and great programming skills. They need a living model - a man or woman of God who is passionate about his or her faith. ~ Doug Fields

Programming is a social activity. ~ Robert C. Martin

It's tragic. The wounds that humans get are so strong that they're like robots operating on childhood programming. And even if they learn the truth about themselves in therapy and rehab, they still cling to their false beliefs and make choices that don't serve them - over and over again." He shakes his head at the cosmic absurdity of it all. "It takes hard, conscious, diligent work to genuinely change. ~ Neil Strauss

The emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions. Here we review the mechanisms of large-scale integration that counterbalance the distributed anatomical and functional organization of brain activity to enable the emergence of coherent behaviour and cognition. Although the mechanisms involved in large-scale integration are still largely unknown, we argue that the most plausible candidate is the formation of dynamic links mediated by synchrony over multiple frequency bands. ~ Francisco Varela

After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field. ~ W. Richard Stevens

Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to! ~ Bertrand Meyer

I think that's so particularly exciting about this moment in time is all the new platforms that are now existing, the Netflixes and the Hulus and Amazons and so and so forth; I mean they are really doing what pay TV was doing twenty years ago. So a show like Dancing On The Edge gets to have a digital life after it's playing on Starz. I think what's exciting is how these new platforms are providing more opportunities both for first-run programming on the one hand but also for second plays for shows that have appeared first either on traditional broadcast or on cable. ~ Colin Callender

People need a function, he believes. And he has always been functional, no one can take that away from him. ~ Fredrik Backman

The universe is already programmed to give each of us a year of happiness. Our challenge lies in programming ourselves to receive it. ~ Marianne Williamson

Her assignment had been to write a simple Sumerian code for preserving a jar of pickled eggs. (To the programming-inclined reader, this is the magical equivalent of "HELLO WORLD.") ~ Sorin Suciu

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there. ~ Ken Thompson

It [AI] would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded. ~ Stephen Hawking

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

The methodological benefits of functional languages are well known [Bac78, Hug89, HJ94], but still the vast majority of programs are written in imperative languages such as C. This apparent contradiction is easily explained by the fact that functional languages have historically been slower than their more traditional cousins, but this gap is narrowing. ~ Chris Okasaki

Any person who says their family is perfectly functional is lying. ~ Martha MacIsaac

Compound actions on shared state, such as incrementing a hit counter (read-modify-write) or lazy initialization (check-then-act), must be made atomic to avoid race conditions. Holding a lock for the entire duration of a compound action can make that compound action atomic. However, just wrapping the compound action with a synchronized block is not sufficient; if synchronization is used to coordinate access to a variable, it is needed everywhere that variable is accessed. Further, when using locks to coordinate access to a variable, the same lock must be used wherever that variable is accessed. ~ Brian Goetz

A brick and a blanket aptly describe my former roommate. He was as dumb as a brick, and only highly functional on a bed. Or so I heard - not that I'd know from personal experience. ~ Jarod Kintz

I was really looking at computers as a way to understand the mind. But at M.I.T., my mind was blown by having a whole computer to yourself as long as you liked.I felt a surge of intellectual power through access to this computer, and I started thinking about what this could mean for kids and the way they learn. That's when we developed the computer programming language for kids, Logo. ~ Seymour Papert

If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots. ~ Billy Graham

To Learn is to create. Learning- whether it is programming, mathematics, art, music, poetry, biology, or chemistry- is all about breaking down walls and freeing the one thing that kept us alive: knowledge.

Knowledge expands freedom in all its forms. Knowledge breaks down walls. It liberates the oppressed. We are committed to knowledge. Knowledge as a hammer against classism, against sexism, against racism, against gender discrimination, against slavery, against bigotry, against war, against hatred. If there is darkness in the world, we will light it up. ~ Leopoldo Gout