A list of my favorite quotes.
Only rarely does some exceptional event lead people to reorganize their intellectual self-image in such a way as to open up new perspectives on what is learnable
- Seymour Papert, Mindstorms
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
– Leslie Lamport
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
— Edsger Dijkstra
Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve.
When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.
– Edsger W.Dijkstra, On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. This would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt.
– Edsger W.Dijkstra, On the foolishness of "natural language programming", h/t cratermoon
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
– Bertrand Russel
The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."
– Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture, from Succinctness is Power by Paul Graham
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating
– Bret Victor
malloc for the internet
– Jeff Bezos's original spec for s3
From Plato's Phaedrus, by way of fs:
Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories. My discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom. But the king answered and said ‘O man full of arts, the god-man Toth, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them.’
And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
A meeting is a refuge from ‘the dreariness of labor and the loneliness of thought.’”
— Bernard Baruch, “A Theory on Meetings” (1970), quoted in The Design of Design by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.