Walter O'Brien Quotes

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field.

If you have an analytical bent like I do, going back to my days as a programmer, you like to ask questions.

I don't program or code or anything like that.

Depending on the kind of code you write, depending on the kind of ideas you have, you can be creative in problem-solving and you can really make things work in a very gratifying way.

I am a programmer.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

Computing should be taught as a rigorous - but fun - discipline covering topics like programming, database structures, and algorithms. That doesn't have to be boring.

Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I'll never be hands-on on anything except software.

Whether you draw diagrams that generate code or you type at a browser, you are coding.

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.

It's something special being able to build a program up.

Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him.

I worked as a programmer for 16 years.

I would play games long enough to discover what games were doing and how they were doing it. And then I'd spend the rest of my time building.

Programmers are very creative people. And animators are problem solvers, just as programmers are.

I grew up as a computer scientist, and I've always been fascinated by algorithms.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge. That's fine.