“Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating.”
— Terence Parr

“A beautifully crafted library with no documentation is damn near worthless. If your software solves the wrong problem or nobody can figure out how to use it, there’s something very bad going on.”
— Tom Preston-Werner, Readme Driven Development

“He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.”
— Francois Voltaire

Epigrams in Programming by Alan Perlis
20 select, out of 120

2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.

8. A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

19. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.

20. Wherever there is modularity there is the potential for misunderstanding: Hiding information implies a need to check communication.

23. To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.

30. In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general – and often we know it too quickly.

31. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

32. Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

39. Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

46. Like punning, programming is a play on words.

54. Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.

63. When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that we do and they don't.

79. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

95. Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

106. It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on.

112. Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

113. The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology will arise from the study of software.

114. Within a computer, natural language is unnatural.

115. Most people find the concept of programming obvious, but the doing impossible.

119. Programming is an unnatural act.

“What is [mathematics] other than the incomprehensible outpourings of superpowered brainboxes, with their heads in the clouds and their feet dangling from the lofty balconies of their ivory towers?”
— Ian Stewart

Mathematics is overspecialized syntax expressing overgeneralized semantics.

“... es ist wahr, ein Mathematiker, der nicht etwas Poet ist, wird nimmer ein vollkommener Mathematiker sein.”

Translation from German
“... it is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.”
— Karl Weierstrass, 1883

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”
— Eugene Wigner

“Profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discoveries.”
— Joseph Fourier

“There are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.”
— Herbert A. Simon, 1958

Starting today, all text here will be wikificated.

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a fantastic theory on which to base the model of an intelligent machine.

“I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it.”
— Ward Cunningham

8 steps to set-up a Java project in VS Code using Git, GitHub, and Gradle

This will help you set-up a Java project in VS Code that:
• Has source control using Git
• Has build automation with Gradle
• Benefits from a flexible development environment that is VS Code
• Is cross-platform and high-level yet, statically-typed and robust per Java
• Has collaborative possibilities through GitHub

But first, make sure you:
• Have Git, Gradle, Java, and VS Code installed, and in PATH
• Have the Git, Gradle and Java VS Code extensions installed and enabled
• Have a GitHub account

If you do, follow these steps:
1. Open the command prompt and use cd to navigate to anywhere you want
2. Use mkdir <project-name> to create a new directory, and cd <project-name> to navigate into it
3. Once inside, do gradle init and interact with it to initialize Gradle there
4. Do code . to open that directory in VS Code
5. Press Ctrl+Shift+G ⌨️, stage all changes, and commit your first commit
6. Create a new repo on GitHub, and copy the URL it gives you
7. Do git init to initialize the directory as a Git repo, git remote add origin <github-url> to set, and git remote -v to verify its remote origin [Source]
8. From within VS Code, click on sync on the bottom left corner

You are done!

#tutorial #java #vscode #gradle #github #git #cli #sourcecontrol #buildautomation

“[It] is like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for the bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.”
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.”
— Claude Lévi-Strauss

“What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.”
— Emil Cioran

“One should accept the truth from whatever source it proceeds.”
— Maimonides

“Reason in man is rather like God in the world.”
— Thomas Aquinas

Font Metrics 101

Source

“The whole threefold analytic art, claiming for itself this office, may be defined as the science of right finding in mathematics.”
— François Viète, in artem analyticem isagoge (1591)