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Fernando J. Corbató Quotes

1926–2019 United States

Fernando José "Corby" Corbató (July 1, 1926 – July 12, 2019) was an American computer scientist and winner of the 1990 Turing Award "for his pioneering work organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, CTSS and Multics."

United States
Academics
Computer scientists

Random Fernando J. Corbató quote

10 quotes

Because one has to be an optimist to begin an ambitious project, it is not surprising that underestimation of completion time is the norm.

On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991)

Design bugs are often subtle and occur by evolution with early assumptions being forgotten as new features or uses are added to systems.

On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991)

My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!

To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing were suddenly restless when response times were more than a second.

On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991)

The computer field is intoxicated with change. We have seen galloping growth over a period of four decades and it still does not seem to be slowing down. The field is not mature yet and already it accounts for a significant percentage of the Gross National Product.

On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991)

The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.

A Managerial View of the Multics System Development (1978)

The value of metaphors should not be underestimated. Metaphors have the virtue of an expected behavior that is understood by all. Unnecessary communication and misunderstandings are reduced. Learning and education are quicker. In effect metaphors are a way of internalizing and abstracting concepts allowing one's thinking to be on a higher plane and low-level mistakes to be avoided.

On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991)

Clearly, one can obfuscate one's ideas with a compiler language but it's harder. To some extent one is talking about what one wants rather than how one wants to do it. The trouble with machine code, of course, is that when you look at a random section of machine code you don't know what properties of the instructions the programmer really wanted to exploit.

It is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Fernando J. Corbató (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.