Vint Cerf Quotes

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.

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.

I don't like programming. It's tedious.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

I am a programmer.

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

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.

Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!

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.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

I would be better at my job if I were technical.

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

After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field.

Code writers, they are my idols.

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

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.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

I was a programmer.

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

As software engineers trained to turn ambiguity into absolutes and fuzzy requirements into ones and zeros, we had a 'eureka' moment when we realized that our training had broader, real-world applications.

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.

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.

Problem-solving, inventing, hacking and coding is more of an adrenaline rush of endorphins rather than a feeling.