Datalogy Quotes of the Day #3

"Algorithms that forget their history are doomed to repeat it."

- Stuart Russel & Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence. A Modern Approach. Second Edition, 2003 p. 82.


"In some very early implementations of Basic, the manual actually suggested removing comments from a program in order to improve its performance."

- Michael L. Scott. Programming Language Pragmatics. Second Edition, 2006, p. 16.
~ The first implementations were interpreters, but it's still a bit of a controversial thing to put into a manual.


"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 E. Knuth. Literate programming. The Computer Journal, 27(2):97–111, May 1984.

Datalogy Quotes of the Day #2

This one will be more realistic than the previous, I've actually gathered some quotes from the stuff I've seen/read this week:

"Programming is like writing inductive proofs."

- Jyrki Katajaine, April 23rd 2010, Datalogy department at the University of Copenhagen, Algorithms and Data Structures, Lecture 2: Divide and conquer.

~At least for me it's just as exciting, I'm told a plane could fall down while I'm coding and I wouldn't notice, same goes for when I do inductive proofs.

"The book [red. CLRS 3ed] is the syllabus, this here [red. the lectures] - this is entertainment."

- Jyrki Katajaine, April 26th 2010, Datalogy department at the University of Copenhagen, Algorithms and Data Structures, Lecture 3: Sorting.

"The key to being a succesfull developer is laziness, [...], and it's like the right kind of laziness, but it's essemtially insuring that you limit the amount of manual labour that you have to go through as you maintain [red. or develop] your application further down the road."

- Ben Galbraith, April 8th 2010, Stanford Engineering, Mobile Application Development, Lecture 2: Web Skills Introduction to Web Development and HTML 5, ca. 14:12-14:30.

Introducing Datalogy Quotes of the Day

Inspired by Arjen Dijksman's Physics Quotes of the Day, I've decided to introduce a new meme to my blog-posts - Datalogy Quotes of the Day. Now, unlike Arjen I do not (yet) read as many scientific papers on Datalogy, but have my sources for at least the next few months, and by that time I guess I'll have to speed up on my reading, hopefully with other benefits for my education :)

"Code doesn't lie, comments might."
- Anonymous programmer

"Software and cathedrals are much the same – first we build them, then we pray."
- Samuel T. Redwine

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
- Rick Osborne