Computer Program Quotes & Sayings

Did you ever think that if you told me where Bill's hiding his computer program, I would give you anything you asked for?
- Eric, club dead. — Charlaine Harris

In high school, one of the things I loved doing was this after-school program where you would teach computer skills to some of the maintenance folks at school. — Mike Krieger

Software development is the process of creating a computer software.
It includes preparing a design, coding the program, and fixing the
bugs. The final goal of software development is to translate user
needs to software product, while continuously improving the team
and the process. — Paulo Caroli

The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program. — Fred Brooks

A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs. — Dennis Ritchie

Whatever actions may have been appropriate for your survival when you were a child, are probably no longer necessary. However, the ego cannot know that. It is like a computer program, reacting to life robotically; doing what it deems is most applicable in the present circumstance, according to past experience. The problem is, it often blocks you from feeling what is appropriate in the present moment, through its preconceived notions of what worked best in the past, and may not necessarily pertain any longer. For example you may resist intimacy now by pushing others away, in effect shut them out, because as a five year old you did the same in order to protect your vulnerability. — Paula Horan

In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently. — Alan Kay

I'm not a computer person at all. I only know how to turn them on. I'm not a programmer. I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag. — Rick Smolan

The program I use is called MED Soundstudio. It's basically a column of numbers that relate to pitch, duration, the type of sound. If I want to play a chord, I have to press keys on a keyboard - like a computer keyboard, on my Amiga - that relate to sharps and flats, note by note. — Max Tundra

When you write a program, think of it primarily as a work of literature. You're trying to write something that human beings are going to read. Don't think of it primarily as something a computer is going to follow. The more effective you are at making your program readable, the more effective it's going to be: You'll understand it today, you'll understand it next week, and your successors who are going to maintain and modify it will understand it. — Donald Knuth

Writing a computer virus program is child's play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of. — Richard Dawkins

Isn't that a computer program? Sadie asked. I wanted — Rick Riordan

If you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage? — Kim Stanley Robinson

As I was leaving graduate school in 1974, I was recruited to join a fledgling SETI project at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, mainly because I knew how to program an ancient PDP8/S computer that had been donated to the project. — Jill Tarter

The mind is an evolved computer program. — Eric Baum

Zero-length arrays are useful only in cases where you have a large structure, which contains a field of dynamic length, and you need to share that structure across program or even computer boundaries. — Robert Love

Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer ... because it teaches you how to think. — Steve Jobs

You would think that, by sheer chance, there would come a time when you daughter's two dances would be close together, ideally near the beginning. But the dance studio makes sure this never happens, using the same computer scheduling program that the cable-TV company uses to make sure that the technician, for whom you have been waiting eleven hours, rings your doorbell only when you have just commenced pooping. — Dave Barry

There is one very good reason to learn programming, but it has nothing to do with preparing for high-tech careers or with making sure one is computer literate in order to avoid being cynically manipulated by the computers of the future. The real value of learning to program can only be understood if we look at learning to program as an exercise of the intellect, as a kind of modern-day Latin that we learn to sharpen our minds. — Roger Schank

Supporters of this fundamental change in immigration policy say we need to import more well-educated talent if we're to stay competitive. But exactly whose competitiveness are we talking about? Not the competitiveness of, say, American-born computer engineers. Adjusted for inflation, their earnings haven't gone anywhere in years. That's in part because American companies have been sending so much of their high-tech work abroad. Bringing more foreign-born engineers here under an expanded H1-B visa program, or a point system for that matter, will just depress wages even further. — Ronald Reagan

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program. — Mitch Kapor

Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same. — Rupert Sheldrake

The Vedic viewpoint presents a type of linguistic realism in which reality is the 'text' which is being processed by the observer. Reality can also be modified by adding text to it similar to how a programmer programs a computer by inputting a computer program. — Ashish Dalela

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

There is nothing - no program, no hobby, no vice, no crime - that does not 'create jobs'. Tsunamis, computer viruses and shooting convenience store clerks all 'create jobs'. So that claim misses the plot; it applies to all so is an argument in favor of none. Instead of an argument on the merits, it is an admission that one has no such arguments. — Chris Horner

I think music will be created algorhythmically, all the things that we do will be boiled down to a little computer program. — Cliff Martinez

A computer program can modify itself but it cannot violate its own instructions - it can at best change some parts of itself by *obeying* its own instructions. — Douglas Hofstadter

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

I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data is too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three. — Robert A. Heinlein

We passed a bill in 1997, signed by Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, which created a pilot program for a novel experiment called Florida Virtual School. The notion of children using a computer for a classroom and reporting to virtual teachers wasn't exactly mainstream thinking in those days. — Dan Webster

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since. — Noam Chomsky

Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program. — Mary Douglas

14. Procrastinator's Clock. For those who are chronically late to meetings, there's the Procrastinator's Clock, a downloadable program for your computer, that displays a digital clock that is guaranteed to be up to fifteen minutes fast. How fast? Well, that's the nudge. You are never exactly sure because the clock unpredictably speeds up and slows down. That assures that users can't game the system. We think that this device might help the lawyer of this team (who shall remain nameless) get to Noodles on time for lunch. A physical version of this clock has already been patented by a company called Emergent Technologies. — Richard H. Thaler

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck. — Frederik Pohl

Every child should learn to program a computer because it will teach you how to think. — Steve Jobs

You
can see all of this online. But that's cheating. No computer program
can compare to the physical experience. It's like learning how to
play a virtual sports game. You're not really playing anything,
against anyone. You're just a spectator. People are becoming
spectators of their own lives instead of living them. But the best part
is getting in the game. That's when it's all worth it. — Katie Kacvinsky

Biology doesn't know in advance what the end product will be; there's no Stuffit Compressor to convert a human being into a genome. But the genome itself is very much akin to a compression scheme, a terrifically efficient description of how to build something of great complexity-perhaps more efficient than anything yet developed in the labs of computer scientists (never mind the complexities of the brain, there are trillions of cells in the rest of the body, and they are all supervised by the same 30,000-gene genome). And although there is no counterpart in nature to a program that compresses a picture into a compact description, there is a natural counterpart to the program that decompresses the compressed encoding, and that's the cell. Genome in, organism out. Through the logic of gene expression, cells are self-regulating factories that translate genomes into biological structure. — Gary F. Marcus

You can sit behind your computer and listen to music via a program or from the Internet and also watch performances on the Internet. There's motivation to sit at home. You don't have to get dressed up, or be social and for those old enough you don't risk DUI charges by drinking at home at the computer. — Steve Mahoney

If you don't have a job right now, and you have a computer and a basic intelligence level, I guarantee you can get a great job, paying really well, in less than three months. How? Learn to program. — Tucker Max

There are several places in Vietnam where they're teaching computer science from second grade in class, so they don't have a gender divide because everybody is expected to program. — Megan Smith

People are surprised by how upset they get in this theater of distress. And then they get upset that they are upset. They often try to reassure themselves, saying things like, "Chill, chill, it's only a toy!" They are experiencing something new: you can feel bad about yourself for how you behave with a computer program. Adults come to the upside-down test knowing two things: the Furby is a machine and they are not torturers. By the end, with a whimpering Furby in tow, they are on new ethical terrain. — Sherry Turkle

In the early stages of negotiation software, on your smartphone, there may be programs that listen to the pitch of a voice, or that test for stress. You'll just ask the program, 'Was he lying? Was he eager to do business with me?' Maybe the computer will be right sixty per cent of the time. — Tyler Cowen

Family life is not a computer program that runs on its own; it needs continual input from everyone. — Neil Kurshan

Transparency once meant being able to "open the hood" to see how things worked. Now, with the Macintosh meaning of transparency dominant in the computer culture, it means quite the opposite: being able to use a program without knowing how it works. — Sherry Turkle

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one's memories. — Stephen Hawking

The five stages of model development. - Donald Knuth, Stanford computer scientist Knuth discovered that computer program development goes through five stages. These steps also apply to building models, and I rigorously adhere to them in my consulting work. 1. Decide what you want the model to do. 2. Decide how to build the model. 3. Build the model. 4. Debug the model. 5. Trash stages 1 through 4 and start again, now that you know what you really wanted in the first place. Once you realize that step 5 is inevitable, you become more willing to discard bad models early rather than continually to patch them up. In fact, I recommend getting to step 5 many times by building an evolving set of prototypes. This is consistent with an emerging style of system development known as Extreme Programming.2 To get a large model to work you must start with a small model that works, not a large model that doesn't work. - Alan Manne, Stanford energy economist — Sam L. Savage

Fast-forward to March 17, 2014, when the Los Angeles Times was the first news company to break a story about a nearby earthquake. Their edge? The article was written entirely by a robot - a computer program that scans streams of data, like that from the U.S. Geological Survey, and puts together short pieces faster than any newsroom chain of command could. This program earned the paper a few minutes of lead time at most, but today, those minutes are critical. — Stanley McChrystal

If India is computer, Congress is its default program. — Rahul Gandhi

TinyWall is a firewall application that by default blocks every program and keeps them from accessing the internet. You can approve individual processes or executables and allow them internet access. This will help to make sure you aren't unwittingly leaking information. If you suspect that someone might be physically accessing your computer while you are away, you can set up a hidden camera to keep an eye on the computer while you are gone. — Rob Robideau

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells ... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers. — Tony Hoare

The stored-program digital computer has three major attributes: it is fast, it is accurate, and it is stupid. The first two attributes are often used to disguise the third. — P. J. Plauger

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct. — Timothy Leary

The labs were happy that I was brave enough to attempt to program it and the $5 million computer was left entirely to my use. I was their human guinea pig. — Philip Emeagwali

I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all. — Chris Parnell

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs. — Edsger Dijkstra

The fear structure is viewed as a program (in the sense of a computer program) for escaping or avoiding danger and includes several kinds of stored propositions: It includes propositions about threats - when the threat signal (CS) occurs, a bad thing (US) follows; propositions about physiological changes - when the CS occurs, I sweat and my heart beats faster; propositions — Joseph E. Ledoux

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine. — Fred Brooks

But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding?
This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no. — John Rogers Searle

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. — Richard Feynman

A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. — Arthur Bloch

When somebody has learned how to program a computer ... You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine. — Tim Berners-Lee

Investment success cannot be captured in a mathematical equation or a computer program. — Seth Klarman

Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to. — Sherry Turkle

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content. — John Searle

Most programs are not write-once. They are reworked and rewritten again and again in their lived. Bugs must be debugged. Changing requirements and the need for increased functionality mean the program itself may be modified on an ongoing basis. During this process, human beings must be able to read and understand the original code. It is therefore more important by far for humans to be able to understand the program than it is for the computer. — Yukihiro Matsumoto

Being on the road, the Internet enables me to interact with people in some way. It's not so much interacting with my fans - it's about doing something with what I have. I have my camera and I have my computer, and if I have some spare time, rather than watching some mindless bullshit pop-idol program on TV, why not show people my pictures and try and discuss things that I feel are important? — Lily Allen

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do — Dennis Ritchie

What Jacob and Monod had discovered, in essence, was that each gene acts like a single line in a computer program. — Gary F. Marcus

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created. — Bill Gates

When we first started with Apple computers, it was my dream that everyone would learn to program, and that was how they'd use their computer. — Steve Wozniak

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

I have several computer companies. One of them I have a program for wide-format printing. I have a beauty program. So I have several different programs that I own for printing. — Jerry Mathers

Be grateful. Find something to be grateful for. Don't do too many things that make you feel like you deserve to lose because we do program our own computers. I believe there is a plus and a minus column and if you end up on the minus column, your own conscience will make you lose. — Jim Carrey

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. — Sherry Turkle

The computer industry began with home-brew boxes that everyone had to program for themselves, but that was a huge hassle. The computer revolution didn't explode until the first Macintosh arrived, with its point-and-click simplicity. — Clive Thompson

Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced. — Maurice Wilkes

I use a really simple calendar program on my computer. — Jamie Zawinski

A speaking, a crisis, people's lives in tatters, the future of the colony in doubt. And I cry in relief because an overblown computer program is speaking to me again, — Orson Scott Card

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. — Jaron Lanier

If the universe is a non-spatial computer, a 'time machine' is a program that allows a user to have the same (ontologically non-spatial) feelings or experiences that occurred or s/he merely feels to have occurred in the past, with an in-built function to have different feelings or experiences than those of the past, and thus creating a possibility to change the past or to rewrite history in a pseudo sense. — Kedar Joshi

The computer may be incompetent in itself
that is, unable to do the work for which it was designed. This kind of incompetence can never be eliminated, because the Peter Principle applies in the plants where computers are designed and manufactured. — Laurence J. Peter

At some stage in the process, most mainstream pop records are being manipulated and possibly completely rebuilt on a computer, with a visual program. — James Blake

2:40AM - 2:41AM (erotic_performance.exe): The curtain opened to reveal a Gateway 2000 computer and monitor running a Fenestra 98 operating system. The display booted up and opened a program on its desktop. The computer then began to rapidly recite a multitude of differential equations as well as their respective 3D graphical representations for 20 seconds. At the end of the program, the monitor displayed the word "INSERT" in the form of a screensaver. D-6744 and D-3432 both inserted $5 into its floppy drive. The curtain then closed at the end of the show. — Anonymous

This proposal would mean our Universe is entirely deterministic, our lives the result of a gigantic computer program that we live within and form part of. — James Tagg

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs. — Douglas Rushkoff

One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer, and in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intense contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building. — Seymour Papert

In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy. — Herbert Simon

A third position has been called "strong Al." When the Mind As Computer metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself. For them, concepts are formal symbols, thought is computation (the manipulation of those symbols), and the mind is a computer program. — George Lakoff

I love my job. I love the pay!
~I love it more and more each day.
~I love my boss, he is the best!
~I love his boss and all the rest.

~I love my office and its location. I hate to have to go on vacation.
~I love my furniture, drab and grey, and piles of paper that grow each day!
~I think my job is swell, there's nothing else I love so well.
~I love to work among my peers, I love their leers, and jeers, and sneers.
~I love my computer and its software; I hug it often though it won't care.
~I love each program and every file, I'd love them more if they worked a while.

~I'm happy to be here. I am. I am.
~I'm the happiest slave of the Firm, I am.
~I love this work. I love these chores.
~I love the meetings with deadly bores.
~I love my job - I'll say it again - I even love those friendly men.
~Those friendly men who've come today, in clean white coats to take me away!!!!! — Dr. Seuss

At the laboratory, Turing designed the first relatively complete electronic stored-program digital computer for code breaking in 1945. Darwin deemed it too ambitious, however, and after several years Turing left in disgust. When the laboratory finally built his design in 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world and, astonishingly, had the memory capacity of an early Macintosh built three decades later. — Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids to learn how to build the things that they think of. — Gever Tulley

Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you're trained in design, it won't look very good and it won't communicate very well. — John Maeda

If I wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea, I want to go to my computer and be able to do it. So I hired someone at Guitar Center to come over to my house and teach me Logic music program, and I learned it over a couple months. — Rachel Platten

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program. — Jon Postel

All my vocals were recorded at home, which was great for me. You can actually have a studio in a computer program called ProTools. I did half the record with ProTools. — David Coverdale

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. — Robert A. Heinlein

The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories. — Gerald Edelman

Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. "In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes," he said. "When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. — Michael Lewis

When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed. — Douglas Rushkoff

The best computer programmers never write a new program when they can use an old one for a new job. — Gerald M. Weinberg