Brian Kernighan Quotes

Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.

The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy.

I have always been a fixer. I am a fixer. I like problems, and I like puzzles, and I like to help people, so I have been a fixer, and I have always been an educator.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

If there is a bug in your code than you have to drop everything you're doing and go fix it.

The world cannot afford to lose the talents of half it's people if we are to solve the many problems that beset us.

Scientific literacy is one of the underpinnings of everything I do. It's why I work with schools. It's why I teach at university. I do a lot of outreach to try and improve general scientific literacy, but the core of all scientific literacy is just literacy.

The mind aware of itself is a pilot... vastly freer than a passenger mind.

You gave us power in our words, so I think before I speak, and that way when I speak, they know I'm here to teach.

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

We have two strategies for coping; the way of avoidance or the way of attention.

My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.

Creativity stands at the center of all education.

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub. (from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)

People need stories...we use stories to teach, to learn, to make sense of the world around us. As long as we need stories, we will need books.

If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.

The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.

I could have a job as a teacher because I like talking in front of people.