Computer Science

"The cleaner and nicer the program, the faster it's going to run. And if it doesn't, it'll be easy to make it fast."

"In 1991, Ellen Spertus, now a computer scientist at Mills College, published a report on women’s experiences in programming classes. She cataloged a landscape populated by men who snickered about the presumed inferiority of women and by professors who told female students that they were “far too pretty” to be studying electrical engineering; when some men at Carnegie Mellon were asked to stop using pictures of naked women as desktop wallpaper on their computers, they angrily complained that it was censorship of the sort practiced by “the Nazis or the Ayatollah Khomeini.” As programming was shutting its doors to women in academia, a similar transformation was taking place in corporate America. The emergence of what would be called “culture fit” was changing the who, and the why, of the hiring process. Managers began picking coders less on the basis of aptitude and more on how well they fit a personality type: the acerbic, aloof male nerd. The shift actually began far earlier, back in the late ’60s, when managers recognized that male coders shared a growing tendency to be antisocial isolates, lording their arcane technical expertise over that of their bosses. Programmers were “often egocentric, slightly neurotic,” as Richard Brandon, a well-known computer-industry analyst, put it in an address at a 1968 conference, adding that “the incidence of beards, sandals and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity are notably greater among this demographic.” In addition to testing for logical thinking, as in Mary Allen Wilkes’s day, companies began using personality tests to select specifically for these sorts of caustic loner qualities. “These became very powerful narratives,” says Nathan Ensmenger, a professor of informatics at Indiana University, who has studied this transition. The hunt for that personality type cut women out. Managers might shrug and accept a man who was unkempt, unshaven and surly, but they wouldn’t tolerate a woman who behaved the same way. Coding increasingly required late nights, but managers claimed that it was too unsafe to have women working into the wee hours, so they forbid them to stay late with the men."

"[A]s programming enjoyed its first burst of cultural attention, so many students were racing to enroll in computer science that universities ran into a supply problem: They didn’t have enough professors to teach everyone. Some added hurdles, courses that students had to pass before they could be accepted into the computer-science major. Punishing workloads and classes that covered the material at a lightning pace weeded out those who didn’t get it immediately. All this fostered an environment in which the students mostly likely to get through were those who had already been exposed to coding — young men, mostly. “Every time the field has instituted these filters on the front end, that’s had the effect of reducing the participation of women in particular,” says Eric S. Roberts, a longtime professor of computer science, now at Reed College, who first studied this problem and called it the “capacity crisis.”"

"Almost 200 years ago, the first person to be what we would now call a coder was, in fact, a woman: Lady Ada Lovelace. As a young mathematician in England in 1833, she met Charles Babbage, an inventor who was struggling to design what he called the Analytical Engine, which would be made of metal gears and able to execute if/then commands and store information in memory. Enthralled, Lovelace grasped the enormous potential of a device like this. A computer that could modify its own instructions and memory could be far more than a rote calculator, she realized. To prove it, Lovelace wrote what is often regarded as the first computer program in history, an algorithm with which the Analytical Engine would calculate the Bernoulli sequence of numbers. (She wasn’t shy about her accomplishments: “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show,” she once wrote.)"

"It might seem strange now that they were happy to take on a random applicant with absolutely no experience in computer programming. But in those days, almost nobody had any experience writing code. The discipline did not yet really exist; there were vanishingly few college courses in it, and no majors. (Stanford, for example, didn’t create a computer-science department until 1965.) So instead, institutions that needed programmers just used aptitude tests to evaluate applicants’ ability to think logically."

"If you are not willing to put a fragment of your soul into the code, don’t program. Do pursue a different path instead…"

"Logic is one thing and commonsense another."

"Logic is logic. That's all I say."

"To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad."

"Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow."

"Logic by definition is that which makes sense: nothing more, nothing less. No miracles. No supernatural hocus-pocus. Everything that takes place, every event, every effect, is logically caused by something, something which preceded it in time, and which provided the physico-chemical causative chain that resulted in the effect. These premises are the foundations of our intellectual existence."

"To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation."

"The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced."

"[ Fuzzy logic is ] a logic whose distinguishing features are (i) fuzzy truth-values expressed in linguistic terms, e.g., true, very true, more or less true, or somewhat true, false, nor very true and not very false, etc2.; (2) imprecise truth tables; and (3) rules of inference whose validity is relative to a context rather than exact."

"Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing."

"Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. ... The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At1 = At2."

"Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realizes himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself in cognition."

"As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom."

"Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect."

"The moment we stop assuming that the ideas of any milieu form static 'propositional systems', and recognize that they constitute historically developing 'conceptual populations', we are free to abandon also the philosophers' traditional assumption that rationality is a sub-species of logicality. ...In non-intellectual contexts... we judge the rationality of a man's conduct, not by how he habitually behaves, but rather how far he modifies his behaviour in new and unfamiliar situations, and it is arguable that the rationality of intellectual performances should be judged, correspondingly, by considering, not the internal consistency of a man's habitual concepts and beliefs, but rather the manner in which he modifies this intellectual position in the face of new and unforeseen experiences."

"Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought."

"It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own."

"An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion."

"Logic is in the eye of the logician."

"Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end."

"Conceptual graphs are system of logic based on the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce and the semantic networks of artificial intelligence. The purpose of the system is to express meaning in a form that is logically precise, humanly readable, and computationally tractable."

"[My aim is] to design logic as a calculating discipline, especially to give access to the exact handling of relative concepts, and, from then on, by emancipation from the routine claims of natural language, to withdraw any fertile soil from "cliché" in the field of philosophy as well. This should prepare the ground for a scientific universal language that, widely differing from linguistic efforts like Volapük [a universal language like Esperanto, very popular in Germany at the time], looks more like a sign language than like a sound language."

"When emotion brings us ghosts from the past, only logic can root us in the present."

"A crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the Pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational"."

"Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit."

"The apparent world goes through developments which are the same as those the logician goes through if he starts from Pure Being and travels on to the Absolute Idea. [...] Why the world should go through this logical evolution is not clear; one is tempted to suppose that the Absolute Idea did not quite understand itself at first, and made mistakes when it tried to embody itself in events. But this, of course, was not what Hegel would have said."

"I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me."

"All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies."

"The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important."

"Mathematics and logic, historically speaking, have been entirely distinct studies. Mathematics has been connected with science, logic with Greek. But both have developed in modern times: logic has become more mathematical and mathematics has become more logical. The consequence is that it has now become wholly impossible to draw a line between the two; in fact, the two are one. They differ as boy and man: logic is the youth of mathematics and mathematics is the manhood of logic. This view is resented by logicians who, having spent their time in the study of classical texts, are incapable of following a piece of symbolic reasoning, and by mathematicians who have learnt a technique without troubling to inquire into its meaning or justification. Both types are now fortunately growing rarer. So much of modern mathematical work is obviously on the border-line of logic, so much of modern logic is symbolic and formal, that the very close relationship of logic and mathematics has become obvious to every instructed student. The proof of their identity is, of course, a matter of detail: starting with premises which would be universally admitted to belong to logic, and arriving by deduction at results which as obviously belong to mathematics, we find that there is no point at which a sharp line can be drawn, with logic to the left and mathematics to the right. If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point, in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica, they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer must be quite arbitrary."

"Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!"

"The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies, needs but small attestation. Its searching penetration by definition alone, before which even mathematical precision fails, would especially commend it to those whom the abstruseness of the study does not terrify, and who recognise the valuable results which must attend discipline of mind. Like a medicine, though not a panacea for every ill, it has the health of the mind for its aim, but requires the determination of a powerful will to imbibe its nauseating yet wholesome influence: it is no wonder therefore that puny intellects, like weak stomachs, abhor and reject it."

"It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better."

"A certain maxim of Logic which I have called Pragmatism has recommended itself to me for diverse reasons and on sundry considerations."

"Logical analysis applied to mental phenomenon shows that there is but one law of mind, namely that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas."

"Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the conceptions of First, Second, Third. First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation."

"Logic and mathematics seem to be the only domains where self-evidence manages to rise above triviality; and this it does, in those domains, by a linking of self-evidence on to self-evidence in the chain reaction known as proof."

"Logicians tell us that a system of ideas containing a contradiction can be used to deduce any statement whatsoever, no matter how absurd."

"It might ... have been supposed that logicians and psychologists would have devoted special attention to meaning, since it is so vital for all the issues with which they are concerned. But that this is not the case will be evident[1] to anyone who studies the Symposium in Mind (October 1920 and following numbers) on "The Meaning of 'Meaning.'""

"Able logicians have a trick of being unutterably wrong when they come to write about life: the instinctive, intuitive sense of human values often fails them quite. Logic is more likely to make a man a fool than the lack of logic is."

"Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence."

"Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities."

"The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians—and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse."

"This fallacy [appeal to authority] is not in itself an error; it is impossible to learn much in today's world without letting somebody else crunch the numbers and offer us explanations. And teachers are sources of necessary information. But how we choose our "authorities" and place a value on such information, is just another skill rarely taught in our education systems. It's little wonder that to most folk, sound bites and talking heads are enough to count as experts. […] Teaching is reinforcing the appeal to authority, where anybody who seems more intelligent than you must ultimately be right. […] We educators must simply role-model critical thinking. […] Educators themselves have to be prepared to show that “evidence” and “answers” are two separate things by firmly believing that, themselves."

"The contemporary mathematical and symbolic logic is certainly very different from its classical predecessor, but they share the radical opposition to dialectical logic. In terms of this opposition, the old and the new formal logic express the same mode of thought. it is purged from that “negative” which loomed so large at the origins of logic and of philosophic thought—the experience of the denying, deceptive, falsifying power of the established reality. And with the elimination of this experience, the conceptual effort to sustain the tension between “is” and “ought”, and to subvert the established universe of discourse in the name of its own truth is likewise eliminated from all thought which is to be objective, exact, and scientific. For the scientific subversion of the immediate experience which establishes the truth of science as against that of immediate experience does not develop the concepts which carry in themselves the protest and the refusal. The new scientific truth which they oppose to the accepted one does not contain in itself the judgment that condemns the established reality. ... In contrast, dialectical thought is and remains unscientific to the extent to which it is such judgment."