Quote #4
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
More from Grace Hopper
- A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
- I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, 'What are you?'
- To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.
- In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, 'Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me.'
- From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.
- At the end of about a week, I called back and said, 'I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?'
- Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
- I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. [:] they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do progr…