Friday, January 28, 2005

Computer Architecture

"It is not a dreary science of paper machines that will never work. No! It's a discipline of keen intellectual interest, requiring the balance of marketplace forces to cost-performance-power leading to glorious failures and some notable successes."

- John Hennessy - David Patterson

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas

"Computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it".

- Marvin Minsky