THE CODE ISSUE 6

Duda Owner IONOS • July 7, 2015

Here is another one of my favorite quotes from the special double issue of Bloomberg Businessweek on computer coding. This one says something about the brains behind the coding. I will let you decide how flattering it may or may not be (Paul Ford, “The Code Issue”, 6/15/15–6/28/15, p. 32):

A huge part of computer science is about understanding the efficiency of algorithms—how long they will take to run. . . . Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are built on top of fundamental computer science and pay great attention to efficiency, because their users do things (searches, status updates, tweets) an extraordinary number of times. Thus it’s absolutely worth their time to find excellent computer scientists, many with doctorates, who know where all the efficiencies are buried.

It takes a good mathematician to be a computer scientist, but a middling one to be an effective programmer.





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