computers quotes

Frederick Brooks, Jr.: 

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found the last bug." (The Mythical Man Month)

Gerald Weinberg: 

If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

Jack Lynch: 

Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.

Joseph Campbell: 

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Pablo Picasso: 

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Paul Valery: 

The ultimate "computer," our own brain, uses only ten watts of power -- one-tenth the energy consumed by a hundred-watt bulb.

Robert Wilensky: 

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Unknown: 

Asking if computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim.

Unknown: 

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Werner von Braun: 

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.