Contents vii
Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind. | ||
--Frank Lloyd Wright |
Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work. | ||
--Thomas Edison |
See Europe! Ten Countries in Seventeen Days! | ||
--Sign in a travel agent's window |
Careful—we don't want to learn from this! | ||
--Calvin and Hobbes |
First things first, but not necessarily in that order. | ||
--Dr. Who, Meglos |
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. | ||
--Albert Einstein |
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. | ||
--Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado |
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. | ||
--Thomas Paine |
“Conducting” is when you draw “designs” in the nowhere—with your stick, or with your hands—which are interpreted as “instructional messages” by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing. | ||
--Frank Zappa |
There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. | ||
--C.A.R. Hoare |
5 Nested Classes and Interfaces 133
Every nonzero finite-dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense when you don't think about it. | ||
--Math Professor, U.C. Berkeley |
“A power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil!” | ||
--Firesign Theatre, “The Giant Rat of Summatra” |
Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt. Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne. Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye. | ||
--Dorothy Parker, “Inventory” |
Census Taker to Housewife: Did you ever have the measles, and, if so, how many?
7 Tokens, Values, and Variables 161
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. | ||
--Johann Sebastian Bach |
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. | ||
--Carl Sagan, Cosmos |
I'm gonna wrap myself in paper, I'm gonna dab myself with glue, Stick some stamps on top of my head! I'm gonna mail myself to you. | ||
--Woody Guthrie, Mail Myself to You |
Dare to be naïve. | ||
--R. Buckminster Fuller |
9 Operators and Expressions 201
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. | ||
--Bertrand Russell |
Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically. | ||
--Calvin Trillin |
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” | ||
--Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland |
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. | ||
--H.H. Williams |
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues. | ||
--Elizabeth Taylor |
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. | ||
--Abraham Lincoln |
12 Exceptions and Assertions 279
A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit. | ||
--The U.S. Army's PS magazine, August 1993 |
The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none. | ||
---Thomas Carlyle |
13 Strings and Regular Expressions 305
What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it? | ||
--Dr. Who, The Two Doctors |
When ideas fail, words come in very handy. | ||
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
At some point, you have to jump out of the plane under the assumption that you can get the parachute sewn together in time to deploy it. | ||
--Jack Rickard |
I'll play it first and tell you what it is later. | ||
--Miles Davis |
I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it. | ||
--Clarence Darrow |
I don't care who does the electin' as long as I get to do the nominatin'. | ||
--Boss Tweed |
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing. | ||
--Samuel Butler |
Be and not seem. | ||
--Ralph Waldo Emerson |
17 Garbage Collection and Memory 447
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries. | ||
--Mark Twain |
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up. | ||
--G.K. Chesterton |
For some reason a glaze passes over people's faces when you say “Canada”. Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something. | ||
--Sandra Gotlieb, wife of Canadian ambassador to U.S. (1981–1989) |
When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog along to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten. | ||
--Robert Prisig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance |
Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of £10. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat. | ||
--Rule 46, Oxford Union Society (circa 1997) |
The universe is made of stories, not atoms. | ||
--Muriel Rukeyser |
From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a | ||
--Peter Williams |
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. | ||
--Virginia Woolf |
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes. Galileo: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes. | ||
--Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo |
Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science. | ||
--Henri Poincaré |
22 Miscellaneous Utilities 623
The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them is a match. | ||
--Will Rogers |
Computers are useless—they can only give you answers. | ||
--Pablo Picasso |
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? | ||
--William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1 |
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. | ||
--John Lehman, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, 1981–1987 |
24 Internationalization and Localization 685
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it. | ||
--Tallulah Bankhead |
Never speak more clearly than you think | ||
--Jeremey Bernstein |
No unmet needs exist, and current unmet needs that are being met will continue to be met. | ||
--Transportation Commission on Unmet Needs, California |
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far the universe is winning. | ||
--Rich Cook |
With every passing hour our solar system comes 43,000 miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. | ||
--Ransom K. Ferm |
Things will get better despite our efforts to improve them. | ||
--Will Rogers |
How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155π107 you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, π seconds is a nanocentury? | ||
---Tom Duff, Bell Labs |
Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule. | ||
--David Guaspari |
The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman. | ||
--Alan J. Perlis |
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. | ||
--Dorothy Parker |
Index 761
It's a d–mn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word! | ||
--Andrew Jackson |
Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes… | ||
--Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (an Agony in Eight Fits) |
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. | ||
--Tennessee Williams |
Someday, Weederman, we'll look back on all this and laugh… It will probably be one of those deep, eerie ones that slowly builds to a blood-curdling maniacal scream, but still it will be a laugh. | ||
--Joe Martin, Mister Boffo |
A child can go only so far in life without potty training. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators. | ||
--Dave Barry |
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