jbranchaud/quotes

quotes

For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question.

-- David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost—swallowed up in the ocean—unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward.

-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data abstraction than 10 functions on 10 data structures.

-- Rich Hickey, quoted in The Joy Of Clojure, Ch. 5

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

-- Donald E. Knuth, Literate Programming

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly.

-- Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science

Programming ought to be regarded as the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.

-- Micheal L. Scott, Programming Language Pragmatics

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

-- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding