Quotes
Here is a collection of interesting quotes related to computer science that I have found over the years.
Emacs causes you to think about ways to write programs to do editing for you rather than ways to write programs to write programs for you... It treats editing as an end rather than a means. Editing itself is not an interesting process; it is what we edit that is interesting.
Analysis
The relevance of this quote can be realised quite easily: There are many
Emacs packages such as abbrev, yasnippet,
tempo and skeleton whose primary purposes are
to automate the typing of commonly-occurring textual structures. Hoyte's
implication seems to be that, if it's possible and worthwhile to define
a snippet (or template, or whatever) for a code form, it makes more
sense to define an abstraction (such as a Lisp macro) within the
language of the code you are writing. This relates strongly to my
blog post about meta-programming.
Threads are evil, because what's the difference between a thread and a process? Threads can fuck up each other's internal data structures.
A user can think they understand what they are doing, but they're really just copy-and-pasting code around. Programming thus becomes akin to magical rituals: you put certain bits of code before other bits, and everything seems to work.
Get a job
Sha na na na na na na na na
Get a job
Sha na na na na na na na na
Wah yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Sha boom
Modern languages are so poorly designed that they hinder you more than they help when you are trying to actually program at a high level if you care about what the results are at the low level, which I do.
The idea that anyone would ever actually do manual memory management in C these days was just unthinkable—I mean, after all, it’s current year, and everyone knows that once it’s current year, an arbitrary set of ideas that I don’t like become intrinsically false.