Brian Kernighan Quotes

There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

It should be mandatory that you understand computer science.

I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.

People don't understand computers. Computers are magical boxes that do things. People believe what computers tell them.

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

I'm into computers and have been for a while.

My first introduction to computers and computer programming came during my freshman year of college. I majored in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science, so I learned during my required courses at Vanderbilt University.

I did not grow up around computers, so technology was not a tool used every day in my household. I was drawn to computer science due to the creative nature of programming and the technology focus.

[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

I don't really love computers.

Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science.

When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night.

I am very bad at computers. I don't really know how to write email.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

I use computers and the Internet every day of my life, and yet I have absolutely no idea how they work. I'm like a labrador watching 'The Matrix.'

The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

Computers rather frighten me, because I never did learn to type, so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.

When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things.

My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.