George Dyson Quotes

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

'Programming' is a four-letter word.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

As technologists, we all write code.

I am a programmer.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

Code is just a list of instructions. There are countries that are teaching it as part of the core curriculum. Having some experience in those early years is very important.

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.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

I wanted to make an explicitly educational comic that taught readers the concepts I covered in my introductory programming class. That's what 'Secret Coders' is. It's both a fun story about a group of tweens who discover a secret coding school, and an explanation of some foundational ideas in computer science.

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.

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

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do.

You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity.

Sometimes it's not always about what you can see or hear but what's under the hood of a game that's most impressive. Between those thousands and thousands of lines of code, magic happens. Sometimes the most amazing feats of gaming wizardry happen without you even noticing.

Programming is usually taught by examples.

I don't program, so I don't belong in Silicon Valley. If I did belong in Silicon Valley, I'd be there creating a revolutionary compression algorithm for billions of dollars.

With computer science, I had to go through that uncomfortable process of my brain establishing a hash table, if you will - the coders will get that - for this new information, because I didn't have one. So I had to establish a brand-new file system from scratch.

We don't know how to actually code, but I wish that I did. It's so much harder than anyone could possibly imagine - it's like learning German.

I don't know how to code. I should know how to code.

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

I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.

Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life.

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs.