Famous Programmers Quotes

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)

Nebuchadnezzar II (King of Babylon 605–562 BC) experienced an episode of insanity which lasted for seven years. The king, who had overseen a magnificent building programme which included the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, found himself humbled by God for boasting about his achievements. His punishment took the form of believing he was an ox, a condition known as ‘boanthropy’, and he lived like a wild animal for seven years, before making a full recovery and being restored to power.

I would walk round that beautiful, unspoilt little island, with its population of under a hundred and where there isn’t a single tarmac road, thinking about how he would truly sound. Perhaps the quietness of the island helped me do so. ‘Everybody thinks he’s French,’ I said to myself as I walked across the great stones that littered the beach at Rushy Bay, or stomped over the tussocky grass of Heathy Hill, with its famous dwarf pansies. ‘The only reason people think Poirot is French is because of his accent,’ I muttered. ‘But he’s Belgian, and I know that French-speaking Belgians don’t sound French, not a bit of it.’" "I also was well aware of Brian Eastman’s advice to me before I left for Bryher: ‘Don’t forget, he may have an accent, but the audience must be able to understand exactly what he’s saying.’ There was my problem in a nutshell." "To help me, I managed to get hold of a set of Belgian Walloon and French radio recordings from the BBC. Poirot came from Liège in Belgium and would have spoken Belgian French, the language of 30 per cent of the country’s population, rather than Walloon, which is very much closer to the ordinary French language. To these I added recordings of English-language stations broadcasting from Belgium, as well as English-language programmes from Paris. My principal concern was to give my Poirot a voice that would ring true, and which would also be the voice of the man I heard in my head when I read his stories. I listened for hours, and then gradually started mixing Walloon Belgian with French, while at the same time slowly relocating the sound of his voice in my body, moving it from my chest to my head, making it sound a little more high-pitched, and yes, a little more fastidious. After several weeks, I finally began to believe that I’d captured it: this was what Poirot would have sounded like if I’d met him in the flesh. This was how he would have spoken to me – with that characteristic little bow as we shook hands, and that little nod of the head to the left as he removed his perfectly brushed grey Homburg hat. The more I heard his voice in my head, and added to my own list of his personal characteristics, the more determined I became never to compromise in my portrayal of Poirot.

In their famous Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx and Engels speak about two phases of communism, the lower and the higher. In the lower one there still prevails the "narrow horizon of bourgeois rights" with its inequality and its wide differentials in individual incomes. Obviously, if in socialism society, according to Marx, still needs to secure the full development of its productive forces until a real economy of wealth and abundance is created, then it has to reward skill and offer incentives. The bureaucrat is in a sense the skilled worker, and there is no doubt that he will place himself on the privileged side of the scale... In practice it proved impossible to establish and maintain the principle proclaimed by the Commune of Paris which served Marx as the guarantee against the rise of bureaucracy, the principle extolled again by Lenin on the eve of October, according to which the functionary should not earn more than the ordinary worker's wage. This principle implied a truly egalitarian society -- and here is part of an important contradiction in the thought of Marx and his disciples. Evidently the argument that no civil servant, no matter how high his function, must earn more than an ordinary worker cannot be reconciled with the other argument that in the lower phase of socialism, which still bears the stamp of "bourgeois rights," it would be utopian to expect "equality of distribution.

Braun the AI took his name from a popular character in Welsh mythology. A great warrior and an intrepid mariner, Braun the Blessed was the high king of the Island of the Mighty. Frequenting the famous ancient stories known as the Welsh Triad, Braun was often portrayed as a giant among mortals and a force of great power. The tales of his ocean navigation and the descriptions of his superhuman size inspired the programmers,

In many respects, the skill set of an artist is similar to that of a programmer. Michelangelo was the archetypal renaissance man: a painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer. Perhaps he would have made an incredible programmer. When asked about how he created one of his most famous works, the statue of David, he said: I looked into the stone and saw him there, and just chipped away everything else. Is that what you do? Do you reduce and remove the complexities of the problem space, chipping them all away until you reach the beautiful code you were aiming for?

She was not alone. “There’s a definite panic on the hip scene in Cambridge,” wrote student radical Raymond Mungo that year, “people going to uncommonly arduous lengths (debt, sacrifice, the prospect of cold toes and brown rice forever) to get away while there’s still time.” And it wasn’t just Cambridge. All over the nation at the dawn of the 1970s, young people were suddenly feeling an urge to get away, to leave the city behind for a new way of life in the country. Some, like Mungo, filled an elderly New England farmhouse with a tangle of comrades. Others sought out mountain-side hermitages in New Mexico or remote single-family Edens in Tennessee. Hilltop Maoists traversed their fields with horse-drawn plows. Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs. Famous musicians forked organic compost into upstate gardens. College professors committed themselves to winter commutes that required swapping high heels for cross-country skis. Computer programmers turned the last page of Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life and packed their families into the car the next day. Most had no farming or carpentry experience, but no matter. To go back to the land, it seemed, all that was necessary was an ardent belief that life in Middle America was corrupt and hollow, that consumer goods were burdensome and unnecessary, that protest was better lived than shouted, and that the best response to a broken culture was to simply reinvent it from scratch.

During World War Two, BBC News was broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe. Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour – the magical sound of freedom. Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the weather conditions in London based on tiny differences in the tone of the broadcast ding-dongs. This information offered invaluable help to the Luftwaffe. When the British Secret Service discovered this, they replaced the live broadcast with a set recording of the famous clock.

Because we sit there in the gap for a long time saying [gasps]. And that’s when you begin to learn the meaning of ‘Lord Have Mercy’. I can’t do anything to raise my state but what I can do is stay honestly ahead of, in plain sight, what’s happened, acknowledging. Here I am. And I think it’s from that repeated acknowledgement of my own helplessness at that level, but refusing to simply hide from that helplessness, that gradually, gradually, gradually the energy that had originally gone into your, sort of, ego programmes gets recaptured to begin to hold this other kind of field of awareness, of attentiveness, that’s not identified with that small self acting out and can begin to become a nest for that deeper and fuller and truer wiser self to live in. And then we begin to Be. Then we begin to have Being. And it’s from that Being that sometimes we can pull ourselves out of that spiral we were heading into, and it’s from that Being that we can begin to offer our force of Being to the world as love, as assistance, as a shift in the energy field for someone else. ‘Baraka’ the Sufis call it. But it comes slowly, because you can’t just, kind of, click your heels together and have Being. It has to accumulate slowly in your being for a life of painfully bearing the crucifixion of inner honesty, and slowly it emerges. Interviewer: So that brings up the question in me, what is then freedom? Because you go on this journey. We start out on this journey to become free, which we call enlightenment. Cynthia: Well, you know, we have so many mixed metaphors as Western and Eastern ways of contexting reality come together like tectonic plates. And they don’t often match up. I think, in a very obvious way, freedom is easy. At the obvious level, what it means is what you’d call ‘freedom from the false self’. Most of us think we’re free, and yet we are not free at all because we are under the absolute compulsion of agendas, addictions and aversions that have been programmed into us from early life, and sometimes from the womb. We have our values, we have our triggers, we have our flash points, we have our agendas. And, as A.H. Almaas said so famously, “Freedom to be your ego is not freedom.” Because that’s slavery. You’re being pulled around by a bull ring in the nose. So part of the work of freedom begins when you can stabilise in yourself this thing that some of the Eastern traditions helpfully call ‘witnessing presence’, which is something deeper that’s not dependent on the pain-pleasure principle, that’s not attracted by attraction, or repulsed by aversion. You know, as my teacher Rafe, the hermit monk of Snowmass, Colorado, used to say, “I want to have enough Being to be nothing.” Which means he is not dependant on the world to give him his identity, because he’s learned his identity nests in something much deeper. [...] And as you finally become free to follow what you might call the ‘homing beacon of your own inner calling’, you realise that it’s only in that complete obedience that freedom lies. And, of course, the trick to that is the word ‘obedience’, which we usually thinks means knuckling under, or capitulating, really comes from the Latin ‘ob audire’, which means ‘to listen deeply’. So, as we listen deeply to the fundamental, what you might call the ‘tuning fork’ of our being – which is given to us not by ourself and is never about self-realisation because the self melts as that realisation comes closer – you find the only freedom is to be your own cell in the vast mystical body of God.

In his famous novel Émile (1762), Rousseau tries to show that boys should be brought up as close to nature as possible, learning by experience. Girls do not need to be educated rationally: their role in life is to please men. Accordingly, Thomas abstracted two girls from orphanages and named them Sabrina and Lucretia. He took them to France to educate them according to Rousseau’s precepts so that one girl could become the perfect wife (one was a spare). He taught them to read and write, and tried to instil in them a hatred of fripperies like fashion, fine titles and luxuries. While the girls were growing up, Day became enamoured of several genteel women, none of whom were prepared to conform to his ideas of wifely perfection. Meanwhile, Lucretia did not cope well with Day’s training programme and he was forced to abandon the experiment. He gave her some money and she later married a shopkeeper. However, Thomas became more and more attached to Sabrina, and their friends expected them to marry. According to Richard Lovell Edgeworth in his Memoirs, Day was ‘never more loved by any woman… nor do I believe, that any woman was to him ever personally more agreeable.’ But Sabrina ‘was too young and artless, to feel the extent of that importance, which my friend [Day] annexed to trifling concessions or resistance to fashion, particularly with respect to female dress.’ Day left Sabrina at a friend’s house, along with some strict instructions on her mode of dress. Then disaster struck over a ‘trifling circumstance… She did, or did not, wear certain long sleeves, and some handkerchief, which had been the object of his dislike, or of his liking.’ Unfortunately Day equated her obedience to his wishes with proof of her attachment; disobedience proved ‘her want of strength of mind.’ So Thomas ‘quitted her for ever!’ He later married a Yorkshire heiress; Sabrina married a barrister.

Although Tata was a very liberal father in some ways, he could also be stubbornly conservative. These attitudes were obvious when I was in Mysore. I wanted to join the extracurricular student paramilitary organisation, the National Cadet Corps (NCC), which had just been introduced. All my college friends had volunteered to participate. However, Tata flatly refused me permission with the diktat: ‘No! I don’t like the idea of girls wearing pants.’ I was very envious of my friends wearing pants in the NCC. After completing my bachelor’s degree in psychology, Tata encouraged me to pursue my passion by enrolling in the master’s degree programme at the Manasa Gangothri campus of the University of Mysore. We were only two girls among eight students in that class. The famous Professor Kuppuswamy was my teacher. We had to conduct practical experiments on human subjects, forming smaller groups. Because we were only two girls, these groups were necessarily mixed. A couple of months later, a professor of philosophy who was a friend of my uncle, K.R. Karanth, wrote to Tata that I was overly friendly with the boys in my class. Tata, with his usual penchant for sending cryptic telegrams, sent one that just said, ‘Come home immediately.’ I took the overnight bus from Mysore and reached Balavana in the morning. Tata confronted me with the offending letter, saying, ‘A professor has complained that you are talking to the boys in your class!’ I was furious. I retorted, saying, ‘We are two girls. We must conduct experiments in teams that include boys. I can’t participate in experiments without talking to the boys. Either you let me go back and study or stop my education. You cannot tell me that I can go back and study psychology without talking to boys in my class.’ My strong ultimatum made him realise how foolish he had been. He sheepishly said, ‘Go back, go back. Do whatever you want to do.’ There was a very strong, caring, trusting relationship between us. I had fought back with facts, and Tata respected that. He never brought up the subject of boys again. In contrast, Amma had total faith in me. I could not do anything wrong. ‘Let Malu do what she wants,’ was her clear opinion. Tata’s judgement of people was much poorer than Amma’s. Even if a stranger wrote something nonsensical to him, he had this tendency to believe the worst first and ask questions later.