Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your read more

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are read more

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the 3.6 million read more

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the 3.6 million year old fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.

The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them read more

The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour read more

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. read more

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed...

May every young scientist remember... and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure read more

May every young scientist remember... and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery. -Patrick Blackett.

FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in read more

FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I --'the fatal disease'-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify read more

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.