As the power of available machines grew by a factor of more than a thousand, society's ambition to apply these machines grew in proportion, and it was the poor programmer who found his job in this exploded field of tension between ends and means. The increased power of the hardware, together with the perhaps even more dramatic increase in its reliability, made solutions feasible that the programmer had not dared to dream about a few years before. And now, a few years later, he had to dream about them and, even worse, he had to transform such dreams into reality! Is it a wonder that we found ourselves in a software crisis?

~ Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

Bible salesman

"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.''

-- Alan J. Perlis

The most horrible invention in the last 20 years

"Here is what I think: The web was probably the most horrible invention in the last 20 years. Just exactly the wrong thing to do.

Now, it happened by accident, and it evolved, and I think that's very interesting. But if you take about 5 steps back and look at this thing we call web and you realize "we're jumping through 85 hoops a day just to get anything done".

How many languages do you have to know to get a freaking a website up?"

-- Bob Martin @ Pragmatic Podcast 29

Watching television

Our parents and grand­pa­rents spent their “Cognitive Surplus” watching tele­vi­sion. That’s a thing of the past… a his­to­ri­cal acci­dent of the old factory-worker age mee­ting the modern mass-media age. Of course it wouldn’t last fore­ver. We humans as a spe­cies were desig­ned to com­pete, not to sit around on our asses.

-- Hugh Macleod @ http://gapingvoid.com/ep/

What killed smalltalk

"What killed smalltalk? It was just so easy to make a mess."

Ward Cunningham