The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet.
The result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.
If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.
Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories – much of the debugging has to be done by others.
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.
Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent and put out without a surgeon general’s warning.
In natural science, Nature has given us a world and we’re just to discover its laws. In computers, we can stuff laws into it and create a world.