Senast ändrad: 23 juli 2008
"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, An Investigation of the Laws of
Thought
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is
not worth knowing."
— Alan Perlis, Epigram 19 in Epigrams on Programming
"The interdependence of thought and speech makes it clear that languages
are not so much a means of expressing truth that has already been
established, but are a means of discovering truth that was previously
unknown. Their diversity is a diversity not of sounds and signs but of ways
of looking at the world."
— Karl Kerenyi, i 1976 års engelska
översättning av Dionysus
"A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing
programs you've already thought of."
— Paul Graham, Hackers and
Painters
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for
machines to execute."
— Harold Abelson & Gerald Jay Sussman,
Structure and Interpretation of
Computer Programs, preface to the
first edition
"A programming language is low level when its programs require attention
to the irrelevant."
— Alan Perlis, Epigram 8 in Epigrams on Programming
"If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will
use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful
language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a
human compiler for one."
— Paul Graham, Revenge of
the Nerds, Appendix: Power
"Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing
of interest is easy."
— Alan Perlis, Epigram 54 in Epigrams on Programming
"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid
it. Geniuses remove it."
— Alan Perlis, Epigram 58 in Epigrams on Programming
"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."
Ibland citerad som
"All models are wrong. Some models are useful."
— George Box & Norman Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response
Surfaces
"Good design is simple. [...] When you're forced to be simple, you're
forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have
to deliver substance."
— Paul Graham, Taste for
Makers, section Good design is simple
"Good design is redesign. [...] Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating
them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix."
— Paul Graham, Taste for
Makers, section Good design is redesign
"People who do good work often think that whatever they're working on is
no good. Others see what they've done and are full of wonder, but the
creator is full of worry. This pattern is no coincidence: it is the worry
that made the work good."
— Paul Graham, Being
Popular, section 10 Redesign
"If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar
results."
— Isaac Newton
"If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to
duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard
problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice."
"This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose
the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home
and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is
that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're
even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind
what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to
acknowledge it."
— Paul Graham, How to Make
Wealth, section Technology = Leverage + note 9
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
— Voltaire
"The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too
obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start
to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on
distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend
and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down
in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games,
books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a
strong craving for distraction."
— Paul Graham, What You'll
Wish You'd Known, note 5
"Luck favors the prepared mind."
— Louis Pasteur
"Rather than trying to stay on top of things, I am trying to get to the
bottom of things."
— Donald Knuth, link
"Errands are so effective at killing great projects that a lot of people
use them for that purpose. Someone who has decided to write a novel, for
example, will suddenly find that the house needs cleaning. People who fail
to write novels don't do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days
without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy
something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee,
checking email. “I don't have time to work,” they say. And they
don't; they've made sure of that."
— Paul Graham,
Good and Bad
Procrastination
"In a way, it's harder to see problems than their solutions. Most people
prefer to remain in denial about problems. It's obvious why: problems are
irritating. They're problems! Imagine if people in 1700 saw their lives the
way we'd see them. It would have been unbearable. This denial is such a
powerful force that, even when presented with possible solutions, people
often prefer to believe they wouldn't work."
— Paul Graham, Ideas for
Startups, section Problems
"I think it's far more important to write well than most people
realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If
you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of
the ideas writing would have generated."
— Paul Graham, Writing,
Briefly
"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."
— Albert Einstein
"Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond
the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before
running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will
assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that
they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the
small trips outside the box that people call innovative."
— Paul Graham, What You Can't
Say
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it."
— Aristotle
"To me it was a relief just to realize it might be ok to be
discontented. The idea that a successful person should be happy has
thousands of years of momentum behind it. If I was any good, why didn't I
have the easy confidence winners are supposed to have? But that, I now
believe, is like a runner asking “If I'm such a good athlete, why do I
feel so tired?” Good runners still get tired; they just get tired at
higher speeds."
— Paul Graham, Is It Worth
Being Wise?
Senast ändrad: 23 juli 2008