Richard Hamming Quotes

The more everybody knows about all aspects of the problems we face, the better off all of us will be. Less time spent explaining things means more time for coming up with creative solutions.

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

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 beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

The decision to join Stripe and run 'Increment' was a pretty easy one for me: It was an opportunity to be impactful, to collect and share best practices from the most effective engineering teams in the world. 'Increment' is a step toward flattening the distance between the Silicon Valley elite and developers everywhere.

If we could find a way to totally empower half of the brains in America, imagine how much more productive we could be.

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

Another trick in software is to avoid rewriting the software by using a piece that's already been written, so called component approach which the latest term for this in the most advanced form is what's called Object Oriented Programming.

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.

Not harder than it should be, no. We're about the business, we're about the work. It's all about the work, always. We have fun and laugh and there're days that are more intense than others, but we're there to make it better. He's always going to try and make it better, I'm always going to try and make it better. So you accept anything, you accept whatever it takes to get it up on the screen and make it worthy.

We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be.

We have made a huge amount of progress over the last 50 years by enabling trade, by enabling kind of collaboration and learning. And actually, in fact, when you look at your average 30-year-old today, they're much better off than a 30-year-old 20 years ago, 30 years ago, because of progress in technology and health care and all the rest of this.

Make the movie your way. Surround yourself with people who know more than you.

The crows may crow, but the hens deliver the goods.

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

When somebody has learned how to program a computer ... You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

Test everything, try everything, and then believe it, and if you find it for the good of many, give it to all.

I would love to see all open-source innovation happen on top of Windows.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

I have a lot to learn from designers.