A Quote by Donald Knuth

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

Donald Knuth

Quote Author

Donald Knuth
American - Scientist
Born: January 10, 1938

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

Edsger Dijkstra

The functional uses of machines and innovative computer programs is not to isolate us but, rather, to promote coexistence. If used properly, it brings us together, granting unimaginable opportunities, magnifying the most quintessential and exclusively human capabilities.

Saroo Brierley

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying ?rst a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t ?exible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

Marvin Minsky

We also have the option of scanning in an image from outside the computer... a photo, or a sketch done with traditional tools; and we can then paint, manipulate, process, change, and further develop the image within the computer, watching our progress on the monitor.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

It's about time we stopped asking what the computer can do for us and instead ask ourselves what we can do for the computer.

Pranav Mistry

Imagine you are writing an email. You are in front of the computer. You are operating the computer, clicking a mouse and typing on a keyboard, but the message will be sent to a human over the internet. So you are working before the computer, but with a human behind the computer.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

Until I reached my late teens, there was not enough money for luxuries - a holiday, a car, or a computer. I learned how to program a computer, in fact, by reading a book. I used to write down programs in a notebook and a few years later when we were able to buy a computer, I typed in my programs to see if they worked. They did. I was lucky.

Zia Haider Rahman

All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. No one of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less.

John C. Lilly

I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.

Ellen Ullman

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

Siri Hustvedt

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Hal Abelson

Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.

Frederick Buechner

The trouble is that the whole 'accept Christ' attitude is likely to be wrong. It shows Christ applying to us rather than us to him. It makes him stand hat-in-hand awaiting our verdict on him, instead of our kneeling with troubled hearts awaiting his verdict on us. It may even permit us to accept Christ by an impulse of mind or emotions, painlessly, at no loss to our ego and no inconvenience to our usual way of life.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Our examination of computer viruses leads us to the conclusion that they are very close to what we might define as "artificial life." Rather than representing a scientific achievement, this probably represents a flaw in our definition.

Gene Spafford

As we live our human lives, let us be like the water. Let us be conscious of the flow. Let us not forget the great ground of being that draws us on through life. Let us live in a knowing hope, aware that all being is in transition, that all movement is back to the source. Let us treat those around us as reminders of our illusionary individuality. We know that they are us and we are them connected in ways we cannot fathom. Let us grow in compassion for all beings, for they share our journey.

Tom Barrett

The more I experience, the more I see that so many things in our future are planned for us, I think that what isn't planned for us is our attitude, and it's our attitude that can change our lives.

Rosemary Altea

A Quote by Donald Knuth

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