Welcome to another Friday, time for an easy and chilled out post with geeky humour and some inspiration to celebrate the end of a long week. I’ll be working on my PhD this weekend, so will be in a darkened room in front of my laptop and a series if IDE’s – fret not, I like it 
Without further ado:
- Programs for sale: Fast, Reliable, Cheap: choose two.
- I, myself, have had many failures and I’ve learned that if you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be -you aren’t stretching your imagination. (J.Backus)
- It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. (J.Bronowski)
- The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. (T.Cargill)
- Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. (E. Dijkastra)
- On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. (Babbage)
About the last two:
- So stop asking me to fix your computers – I have no idea how to I’m a Comp. Scientist
- And this still happens all the time, still!
A few examples and funny ones at that from teaching days:
Student 1 catastrophe (after 2 intensive weeks of Java classes): “So, is the compiler a person or some software?”.
Student 2 (admittedly after only a few classes of Java):
- “My code doesn’t work”
- “Humm…let’s take a look”
…after 15 minutes… “It’s very strange, everything looks perfectly ok, lets type it all out again”…
…typing… System.out.println(“Hello World!”);
- Oh! Is it “println” with an “L” and not a “1″?
- Yes.
