听Brian Kernighan讲编程

今天听了Brian Kernighan的seminar,名为:The Changing (?) Face of Programming。老头非常幽默。不过我其实没什么好说的。可能最大的收获就是引起了对javascript的兴趣。另外,里面引用了一些其它人的话也非常有意思。比如:

Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.
-- Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941), Language, Thought and Reality

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++

Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
-- Winston Churchill, radio address, February 9, 1941

A most important ... aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use.
-- Edsger Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming, 1976

Good fences make good neighbors
-- Robert Frost, Mending Wall, 1914

Little wonder then that we see so many poorly designed APIs: it is not reasonable to expect programmers to be good at something they have never been taught.
-- Michi Henning, "API: Design Matters", ACM Queue, May 2007

We undoubtedly produce software by backward techniques. ... I would like to see components become a dignified branch of software engineering.
-- Doug McIlroy, Mass Produced Software Components, NATO Software Engineering Conference, 1968

There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
-- Fred Brooks, "No Silver Bullet", 1986

- Written on Fri Nov 14 06:35:33 2008.