Predictions
- “Two years from now, spam will be solved.”
– Bill Gates, 2004 - “The problem of viruses is temporary and will be solved in two years.”
– John McAfee, 1988 - “Computer viruses are an urban legend.”
– Peter Norton, 1988 - “In 2031, lawyers will be commonly a part of most development teams.”
– Grady Booch - “I don’t know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.”
– CA Hoare, 1982 - “In the future, computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes.”
– Popular mechanics, 1949 - “I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.”
– Bill Gates, 1994 - “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia.”
– Arthur Summerfield, 1959, United States Post
Security
- “I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.”
– Stephen Hawking - “The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.”
– Gene Spafford - “Being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.”
– Eric Raymond - “Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption and secure access devices, and it’s money wasted, because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain.”
– Kevin Mitnick - “If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.”
– Bruce Schneier - “Hoaxes use weaknesses in human behavior to ensure they are replicated and distributed. In other words, hoaxes prey on the Human Operating System.”
– Stewart Kirkpatrick - “Passwords are like underwear: you don’t let people see it, you should change it very often, and you shouldn’t share it with strangers.”
– Chris Pirillo
Programming Languages
- “Manually managing blocks of memory in C is like juggling bars of soap in a prison shower: It’s all fun and games until you forget about one of them.”
– anonymous Usenet user - “There’s no obfuscated Perl contest because it’s pointless.”
– Jeff Polk - “Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.”
– Alan Kay - “There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation.”
– Bertrand Meyer - “It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it!”
– Mark Andreesen, speaking of the HTML tag BLINK - “Web Services are like teenage sex. Everyone is talking about doing it, and those who are actually doing it are doing it badly.”
– Michelle Bustamante - “Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”
– Keith Bostic - “I didn’t work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it’s not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.”
– Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka “Matz”, creator of Ruby - “XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.”
– Charles Simonyi - “BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.”
– Seymour Papert - “It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trivial details of a program — such as where its bugs are.”
– David Keppel - “UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.”
– Dennis Ritchie - “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
– Jamie Zawinski
Internet
- “The Internet? We are not interested in it.”
– Bill Gates, 1993 - “The best way to get accurate information on Usenet is to post something wrong and wait for corrections.”
– Matthew Austern
Computing
- “I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them.”
– Isaac Asimov - “A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.”
– Emo Philips - “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
– Edsger W. Dijkstra - “The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”
– Bill Gates - “Software is like entropy: It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.”
– Norman Augustine - “Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.”
– Nathan Myhrvold - “All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.”
– IBM Manual, 1925 - “Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.”
– Alan Bennett - “Physics is the universe’s operating system.”
– Steven R Garman - “It’s hardware that makes a machine fast. It’s software that makes a fast machine slow.”
– Craig Bruce
