Philip Greenspun Quotes

#1. The devil is real. He lives inside C programs.

Philip Greenspun

#2. Like most people in Academia, my vision of the future is the same as the average industry person's vision of five years ago.

Philip Greenspun

#3. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

Philip Greenspun

#4. SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

Philip Greenspun

#5. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.

Philip Greenspun

#6. Frame is a good enough piece of software that there are actually rewards to taking an intelligent and formal approach to your problem. But if you want to be stupid, you can think of Frame as a version of Microsoft Word with most of the bugs taken out.

Philip Greenspun

#7. We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum.

Philip Greenspun

#8. We worried about competitors, but it was an unreasonable fear. As a friend once pointed out, most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted.

Philip Greenspun

#9. Even the lamest page can be saved by collaboration.

Philip Greenspun

#10. An unmarried adult who cannot navigate the welfare system has no choice but to work, but a married working parent is constantly evaluating the relative merits of staying home with the kids versus bringing home that second paycheck.

Philip Greenspun

#11. I don't myself believe in astrology. However, I think that's because I'm a Libra and Libras are always skeptical.

Philip Greenspun

#12. Although the Buddhists will tell you that desire is the root of suffering, my personal experience leads me to point the finger at system administration.

Philip Greenspun

#13. Pilots enjoy the fun and challenge of handling the fancy machine.

Philip Greenspun

#14. The real challenge of being a flight attendant is getting people out. The training requires that they demonstrate they can evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds, but of course, a lot of stuff that is easy to do in training turns out to be tough in practice.

Philip Greenspun

#15. The book the Ziff folks sent me as an example of their art was 'Late Night VRML 2.0 with Java,' 700 pages + CD-ROM, published February 1997. I was personally acquainted with more movie stars than people who might conceivably have wanted to buy this book or any book like it.

Philip Greenspun

#16. Remember that in 1993 a company with a bad Web site needed an engineer. Today, a company with a bad Web site needs a psychiatrist.

Philip Greenspun

#17. Most people who are rich chose their parents wisely.

Philip Greenspun

#18. Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.

Philip Greenspun

#19. 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.

Philip Greenspun