Elliott Slaughter's Home Page

Many of these are borrowed from Paul Graham's excelent quotes site.

"I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking."
Lord Peter Wimsey, in Have His Carcass by Dorothy Sayers

"The fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood."
Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament

"I am about to tell you something that you will find completely ridiculous and impossible, but 5 minutes later you'll be absolutely convinced that it's true, and in fact you'll think it's completely obvious. I think maths is the only academic subject in which this can happen."
Peter J. Cameron, Something completely ridiculous and impossible, but true

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-cambridge-permute.el

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
Edsger Dijkstra

"I object to doing things that computers can do."
Olin Shivers

"It’s odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical. Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh."
Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters, "Good Bad Attitude"

"Inefficient software isn't gross. What's gross is a language that makes programmers do needless work. Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster."
Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters, "The Hundred-Year Language"

"The Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job."
Paul Graham, "The Python Paradox"

"Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."
Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

"Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me."
David Thornley, reply to a question older than most languages

"Guy Steele leads a small team of researchers in Burlington, Massachusetts, who are taking on an enormous challenge—create a programming language better than Java."
Sun.Com (my italics)

"Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Philip Greenspun

"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing."
Philip Greenspun

"If you are a good information designer or Web/db developer you can easily make enough money to live better than 95 percent of Americans, but it is unclear how to make enough to push past an additional 4 percent to become obscenely wealthy. If you aren't richer than Bill Gates, there is really no distinction in being rich. So unless you have a credible plan for becoming richer than Bill Gates, it is probably best to try to achieve something worthwhile."
Philip Greenspun

"As soon as you start to think about how to get everything to really, really, really, really, REALLY work, it becomes much more complicated. So software starts out with a simple vision and it grows a million little hairy messy things. And depending on the quality of the initial vision, those hairy things may be more or less hairy, but they're going to exist.

And therefore, because software seems so simple and is actually complicated, you can't implement it until you specify the complication. And all these people that are trying to make the same perpetual-motion machine—where you just write your specification and it automatically becomes code—don't realize that the specification has to be as detailed as the code in order to work."
Joel Spolsky

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
Alan Kay

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve."
Alan Perlis

"We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."
Carl Winfeld

"There is absolutely no reason to allow a mistake to become an ego shattering experience. Being wrong is not the problem. Making a mistake is not the problem; making several mistakes is not the problem. The problem is being unwilling to accept the mistake. The problem is staying wrong." The Chartist Newsletter, regarding their stop loss strategy

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
Mark Twain

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."
Einstein

"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."
Tara Ploughman (aka Paul Graham)

"Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people."
G. M. Trevelyan, "Bias in History"

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

"Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere."
Frank Herbert, Dune

"What do you despise? By this you are truly known."
Frank Herbert, Dune

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."
Frank Herbert, Dune

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
Frank Herbert, Dune