“#UNIX resulted from research [...] we were merely interested in. We were very lucky it turned out to be very fruitful.”
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/japan-prize-honors-googler-ken-thompson.html
“I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity.”
#ClaudeShannon
“The teams that invented the laser, transistor and solar cell were not seeking profits. They were seeking understanding.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html
“Science is as much for intellectual enjoyment as for practical utility.”
#Feynman
“A scientist is not only a technician: he's also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.”
#MarieCurie
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”
#Voltaire
“Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.”
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2089155.2089159
“Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems; great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.”
#StefanBanach
“Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.”
#Dijkstra
“Merely adding features does not make it easier for users to do things — it just makes the manual thicker.”
http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
#Nietzsche
“Chekhov said, and Saul Bellow very much agreed with this, that everything he read seemed not short enough.”
#MartinAmis
“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”
#UrsulaKLeGuin
http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html
“Any equation with reasonably smooth solutions can be regarded as defining some kind of trade-off among its variable quantities.”
#MarvinMinsky
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/TuringLecture/TuringLecture.html
“Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.”
#DavidGelernter
Michel de #Montaigne on #AGI: “Mankind is mad — he doesn’t know how to make a mite, yet he forges gods by the dozen.”
(“L’homme est bien insensé: Il ne saurait forger un ciron, et forge des Dieux à douzaines.”)
“Complete list of data structures for almost all practical programs: array, linked list, hash table, binary tree.”
#RobPike
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/pikestyle
“The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and the way we express what we think.”
#Abelson and #Sussman, #SICP
“The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.”
#AdaLovelace
“A graphic should not show only the leaves; it should show the branches as well as the entire tree.”
#JacquesBertin
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”
#BertrandRussell
“Modular construction is a powerful strategy for controlling complexity in engineering design.”
#Abelson and #Sussman, #SICP
“To complicate is simple, to simplify is complicated. Everybody is able to complicate. Only a few can simplify.”
#BrunoMunari
“Originality is dependent on the obscurity of your sources.”
#JohnHegarty
“We have to keep it crisp, disentangled, and simple if we refuse to be crushed by the complexities of our own making.”
#Dijkstra
“The three works can be seen as the earliest known 'Internet memes.'”
https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/30/emoticon-emoji-text-ii-ascii/
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.”
#JulesVerne
“I mix mathematics and art every day.”
#BenoitMandelbrot
“One of the key tools of science remains detailed visual observation.”
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002nh
“Understanding perception is critical to effective visualization design.”
#Heer and #Bostock
https://www.cs.kent.edu/~javed/class-P2P12F/papers-2012/PAPER2012-2010-MTurk-CHI.pdf
