Engineering
Engineering is the creative application of science, mathematical methods, and empirical evidence to the innovation, design, construction, operation and maintenance of structures, machines, materials, devices, systems, processes, and organizations. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of applied mathematics, applied science, and types of application. See glossary of engineering.
Programming
Asking for efficiency and adaptability in the same program is like asking for a beautiful and modest wife. Although beauty and modesty have been known to occur in the same woman, we'll probably have to settle for one or the other. At least that's better than neither.
Gerald M. Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming (1971), Chapter 2, page 22
Programming
[This] reminds me of a quotation from somebody that, whenever he tried to explain the logical structure of a programming language to a programmer, it was like a cat trying to explain to a fish what it feels like to be wet.
Saul Gorn, quoted by Julien Green in Microprogramming, Emulators and Programming languages, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 9, No. 3 (March 1966), pp. 230-232
Engineering
When I looked at the science of engineering and saw that it had disappeared after its ancient heritage, that its masters have perished, and that their memories are now forgotten, I worked my wits and thoughts in secrecy about philosophical shapes and figures, which could move the mind, with effort, from nothingness to being and from idleness to motion. And I arranged these shapes one by one in drawings and explained them
Al-Muradi, The Book of Secrets in the Results of Ideas, 11th century; Translated and cited at leonardo3.net/bookofsecrets/index, 2015
