<= Previous | July Issues Index | Next =>
Your Quotes for 7 July 2005 - Programs

Joseph-Marie Jacquard was born at Lyon, France on this day in 1752. His parents both worked in weaving mills and got him a job as a "draw boy" at age ten. After seeing action in the French Revolution, on both sides actually, he found himself back in the weaving business when he inherited two looms from his father. In 1801 he exhibited a loom which could automatically weave complex designs based on a pattern of holes in wooden bars. Angry master weavers responded by destroying many of the looms, but in ten years there were 12,000 of his looms in use in France. His concept also lead directly to the use of Hollerith punch cards in computing: In both textiles and computers the first programs were based on Jacquard's work.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
     - Bill Bryson, Notes from a Big Country

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
     - Edsger Dijkstra

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.
     - John Kenneth Galbraith

Computers can now keep a man's every transgression recorded in a permanent memory bank, duplicating with complex programming and intricate wiring a feat his wife handles quite well without fuss or fanfare.
     - Lane Olinghouse

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
     - Rick Cook

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
     - Isaac Asimov, 1920 - 1992

Would you like to see quotes like these in your mail tomorrow morning? Our 10,000 loyal subscribers hate to miss a day, perhaps you should sign up now! No cost or obligation, just be open to the enlightenment waiting for you among our 22,500+ quotes.