Ad-hoc Quotes

I'm not a professional. Yet somehow, I manage to get away with it.

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

I don't know we have a method. We show up at the office. Is that a method? That's about the extent to which it's been formalized, asystematised. We show up at the office and talk, talk a scene through.

Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM.

It is not intuitive ease I am after, but rather a point of view which is sufficiently definite to clear up some difficulties, and to be criticized in rational terms. (Bohr's complementarity cannot be so criticized, I fear; it can only be accepted or denounced - perhaps as being ad hoc, or as being irrational, or as being hopelessly vague.)

My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.

The conspiracies that I've researched and encountered, they seem to happen very ad hoc: they become conspiracies when it's necessary to have a conspiracy.