In contrast, too many new programmers write as if there were no programmers before them and there shall come none after them. The best of the new breed learn to program from learn-by-example-in-21-days textbooks of very low quality; the worst learn from guesswork and trial and error with a Pavlovian focus on pain avoidance. None of them learn to do it right from a master of the art of programming. Instead, they learn from watching other programs perform. I blame the intense redirection of energy away from programming to user interface design on this lack of ability to read the language from programmer to computer.
In gnu.misc.discuss
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
"Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers"
Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?
Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for more assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
I went on to test the program in every way I could devise. I strained it to expose its weaknesses. I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold. I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case. Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's temperature to be less than absolute zero. I had found an error. I chased down the error and fixed it. Now I had improved the program to the point where it would not run at all.
Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black Holes and the Fate of Stars
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity, in a girl it is boldness. The two sexes have a tendency to approach, and each assumes the qualities of the other.
Larger projects generally do not meet one or more of the criteria for success: schedule, budget, or customer satisfaction. Furthermore, a post-mortem of the large project will not pinpoint the explicit causes of failure.
The Program Development Process: The Programming Team
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. That danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man to the bonds of Hell.
I fear the the new object-oriented systems may suffer the fate of LISP, in that they can do many things, but the complexity of the class hierarchies may cause them to collapse under their own weight.
Operating Systems of the 90s and beyond, A. Karshmer, J. Nehmer, eds.
Why do we behave like this? I believe that it is because operating systems have had for many years the reputation of being very difficult to write and you had better not mess with them. It's also been policy that machines are very fast and it doesn't matter if you execute two or three times as many instructions as necessary; by the time you've debugged a faster version the processors will be three times as fast as they are now anyhow. Nor does it matter (it's policy) that over-general programs are too big. Memory's cheap. I think this attitude is exceptionally bad. It leads to big clumsy implementations, and, when used in a teaching environment, corrupts the minds of the young, which isn't our proper business.
"What Next? Some Speculations", in Operating Systems of the 90s and beyond, A. Karshmer, J. Nehmer, eds.
The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.
So where the sheer incompetence of politicians and generals used to start wars, the sheer incompetence of us computer people has now put an end to it. No mean feat. For centuries humanity has been looking for the Weapon That Would End War Forever. We have found it. War has ended, not with the bang of a bomb, but with the gentle whisper of crashing software.
One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer terror.
I think that it is hard to read such material without amusement. I feel a little admiration as well. I would never write, "It happened one frosty look of trees waving gracefully against the wall." I almost wish I could. Poor poets endlessly rhyme love with dove, and they are constrained by their highly trained mediocrity never to write a good line. In some sense, a stochastic process can do better; it at least has a chance.
On randomly generated sentences, in "Symbols, Signals, and Noise"
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth.
Sooner or later I suppose the want will be supplied, in that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants.
In "How to Write a Detective Story"
Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it.
Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed.
When the folklorist drew the villagers' attention to the authentic version, they replied the old woman had forgotten, that her great grief had almost destroyed her mind. It was the myth that told the truth, the real story was already only a falsification. Besides, was not myth truer by the fact that it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, revealing a tragic destiny?
The Myth of the Eternal Return
GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions.
In comp.unix.wizards on June 22, 1991
To those accustomed to the precise, structured methods of conventional system development, exploratory development techniques may seem messy, inelegant, and unsatisfying. But it's a question of congruence: precision and flexibility may be just as dysfunctional in novel, uncertain situations as sloppiness and vacillation are in familiar, well-defined ones. Those who admire the massive, rigid bone structures of dinosaurs should remember that jellyfish still enjoy their very secure ecological niche.
"Power Tools for Programmers"
My work speaks far more eloquently than I do, and if people get anything at all out of the tracks, whether it's what I intended or not, then that's great. But I don't care if people like me or not -- I am what I am, I do the best I can, and that's what matters.
In an interview in Details magazine, March 1994
Cyberspace, n.: The juncture of digital information and human perception, the "matrix" of civilization where banks exchange money (credit) and information seekers navigate layers of data stored and represented in virtual space. Buildings in cyberspace may have more dimensions than physical buildings do, and cyberspace may reflect different laws of existence. It has been said that cyberspace is where you are when you are having a phone conversation or where your ATM money exists. It is where electronic mail travels and it resembles the Toontown in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
From the glossary of The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality
It makes more sense to distinguish different kinds of causes, rather than caused versus uncaused actions, or causes we know versus causes we don't. If we find out somebody committed assault because physiologically, his brain made the victim look like a leaping tiger, then we don't punish him. If we find he did it because physiologically, he's a jerk, then we do.
In alt.atheism.moderated, 10 May 1999