192 quotes found
"Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."
"Lisp is a programmable programming language."
"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing."
"One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented."
"God wrote in Lisp code When he filled the leaves with green. The fractal flowers and recursive roots: The most lovely hack I've seen."
"The greatest single programming language ever designed."
"I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were "Maxwell’s Equations of Software!""
"LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use (after FORTRAN)... Its core occupies some kind of local optimum in the space of programming languages given that static friction discourages purely notational changes. Recursive use of conditional expressions, representation of symbolic information externally by lists and internally by list structure, and representation of program in the same way will probably have a very long life."
"One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage."
"The conception of list processing as an abstraction created a new world in which designation and dynamic symbolic structure were the defining characteristics. The embedding of the early list processing systems in languages (the IPLs, LISP) is often decried as having been a barrier to the diffusion of list processing techniques throughout programming practice; but it was the vehicle that held the abstraction together."
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."
"Emacs is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful."
"By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals. And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them."
"APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp."
"Last night, I drifted off while reading a Lisp book. Suddenly, I was bathed in a suffusion of blue. At once, just like they said, I felt a great enlightenment. I saw the naked structure of Lisp code unfold before me. (My god. It's full of "car"s.) The patterns and metapatterns danced. Syntax faded, and I swam in the purity of quantified conception. Of ideas manifest. Truly, this was the language from which the Gods wrought the universe! [God replies:] "No, it's not. [...] I mean, ostensibly, yes. Honestly, we hacked most of it together with Perl.""
"1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular... Fortunately for computer science the supply of curly braces and angle brackets remains high."
"1978 - John Allen in the chapter on Implications of LISP writes: "the power of high level languages is notational rather than computational". This insight is the most significant lesson that LISP teaches, and points to the possibility of going Beyond Programming in the "Age of Significance""
"Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers."
"Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
"Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people."
"Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms -- imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place."
"C is coupled with Unix in the worse-is-better scenario, and can anyone seriously propose Lisp as the right-thing alternative? Lisp, face it, is used for advanced research and development in AI and other esoteric areas. It has weird syntax, and almost all other computer languages share a non-Lispy syntax. Syntax, folks, is religion, and Lisp is the wrong one. Lisp is used by weirdos who do weirdo science."
"Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages."
"You can use C++ if you want with GNOME, but we don't assume that you're going to write C++. It's to a large extent based on Scheme, which is a dialect of LISP. LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that's the GNU project always prefers."
"The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages."
"And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?"
"A notable group of exceptions to all the previous systems are Interactive LISP [...] and TRAC. Both are functionally oriented (one list, the other string), both talk to the user with one language, and both are "homoiconic" in that their internal and external representations are essentially the same. They both have the ability to dynamically create new functions which may then be elaborated at the users's pleasure. Their only great drawback is that programs written in them look like King Burniburiach's letter to the Sumerians done in Babylonian cuniform!"
"DOLIST is similar to Perl's foreach or Python's for. Java added a similar kind of loop construct with the "enhanced" for loop in Java 1.5, as part of JSR-201. Notice what a difference macros make. A Lisp programmer who notices a common pattern in their code can write a macro to give themselves a source-level abstraction of that pattern. A Java programmer who notices the same pattern has to convince Sun that this particular abstraction is worth adding to the language. Then Sun has to publish a JSR and convene an industry-wide "expert group" to hash everything out. That process--according to Sun--takes an average of 18 months. After that, the compiler writers all have to go upgrade their compilers to support the new feature. And even once the Java programmer's favorite compiler supports the new version of Java, they probably still can't use the new feature until they're allowed to break source compatibility with older versions of Java. So an annoyance that Common Lisp programmers can resolve for themselves within five minutes plagues Java programmers for years."
"Common Lisp people seem to behave in a way that is akin to the Borg: they study the various new things that people do with interest and then find that it was eminently doable in Common Lisp all along and that they can use these new techniques if they think they need them."
"If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror."
"In 30 years Lisp will likely be ahead of C++/Java (but behind something else)"
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing."
"The Largest Disservice to LISP is most frequently done whenever a LISP advocate opens his/her mouth. LISP advocates have been, in my limited and biased experience, some of the most arrogant and condescending bastards in the world. (…) I have heard more than one LISP advocate state such subjective comments as, "LISP is the most powerful and elegant programming language in the world" and expect such comments to be taken as objective truth. I have never heard a Java, C++, C, Perl, or Python advocate make the same claim about their own language of choice."
"In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP ... remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension""
"Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form."
"(What the world needs (I think) is not (a Lisp (with fewer parentheses)) but (an English (with more.)))"
"These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age."
"Some said the world should be in Perl, Some said in Lisp. Now, having given both a whirl, I held with those who favored Perl. But I fear we passed to men A disappointing founding myth. And should we write it all again, I'd end it with A close-paren."
"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."
"And what defines a 'python activist' anyway? Blowing up Perl installations worldwide?"
"As it seems to me, in Perl you have to be an expert to correctly make a nested data structure like, say, a list of hashes of instances. In Python, you have to be an idiot not to be able to do it, because you just write it down."
"Python is more concerned with making it easy to write good programs than difficult to write bad ones."
"As I said in my comments to the committee, [Fortran 90' would be a] nice language, too bad it's not Fortran."
"FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes."
"In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included."
"FORTRAN—the "infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use."
"Recall the first American space probe to Venus, reportedly lost because Fortran cannot recognize a missing comma in a DO statement…"
"The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language."
"People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings — they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example."
"FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular."
"95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran."
"Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice."
"Warning: Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200."
""A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard." — a fortune cookie from the Unix program fortune."
"The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change."
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
"For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesity; as a result, the study and invention of programming languages has lost much of its excitement. Instead, it is now the province of those who prefer to work with thick compendia of details rather than wrestle with new ideas. Discussions about programming languages often resemble medieval debates about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin instead of exciting contests between fundamentally differing concepts."
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
"Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: If a group of N persons implements a [COBOL] compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone in the group has to be the manager."
"When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease."
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
"Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distributed' or 'higher-order' or 'applicative' and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult."
"About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead."
"If there is ever a science of programming language design, it will probably consist largely of matching languages to the design methods they support."
"To the designer of programming languages, I say: unless you can support the paradigms I use when I program, or at least support my extending your language into one that does support my programming methods, I don't need your shiny new languages."
"Typing is no substitute for thinking."
"At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars."
"My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. [...] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program."
"Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer."
"Computer scientists have so far worked on developing powerful programming languages that make it possible to solve the technical problems of computation. Little effort has gone toward devising the languages of interaction."
"Programmers should never be satisfied with languages which permit them to program everything, but to program nothing of interest easily."
"When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop."
"If someone claims to have the perfect programming language, he is either a fool or a salesman or both."
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use ." Now they have two problems."
"Perl is the most popular web programming language. Over a million people program with Perl. That is approximately one Perl programmer for every resident of Hyderabad, Pakistan or Donetsk, Ukraine."
"Perl is the most popular language for creating CGI programs. Perl is the acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language. Every computer platform supports this language and hence widely used."
"Perl is the ultimate language for text manipulation, and it has powerful tools for manipulation of lists and other data structures."
"Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."
"There's no obfuscated Perl contest because it's pointless."
"Haskell is faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP."
"If you can't do , you can't do biology, and Perl is the biologist's favorite language for doing bioinformatics."
"Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something."
"A Perl script is "correct" if it gets the job done before your boss fires you."
"The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. (On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.)"
"[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby."
"Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi."
"Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one."
"Today, we're at the beginning stages of the next level. Executable UML is the next logical, and perhaps inevitable, evolutionary step in the ever-rising level of abstraction at which programmers express software solutions. Rather than elaborate an analysis product into a design product and then write code, application developers of the future will use tools to translate abstract application constructs into executable entities. Someday soon, the idea of writing an application in Java or C++ will seem as absurd as writing an application in assembler does today."
"I think C++ was pushed well beyond its complexity threshold and yet there are a lot of people programming it. But what you do is you force people to subset it. So almost every shop that I know of that uses C++ says, “Yes, we’re using C++ but we’re not doing multiple-implementation inheritance and we’re not using operator overloading.” There are just a bunch of features that you’re not going to use because the complexity of the resulting code is too high. And I don’t think it’s good when you have to start doing that. You lose this programmer portability where everyone can read everyone else’s code, which I think is such a good thing."
""Tsk, tsk," said the Hatter, "what a mess you've made.""It is perfectly fine," replied Alice calmly. "I will leave it for the garbage collection service to recover.""Don't expect any garbage collection here. Furthermore, your polymorphic variables won't ever be properly deleted, because you haven't declared your destructor to be virtual.""My what to be what?" said Alice, starting to get worried."Declare your destructor. You must have a destructor. Everything that is constructed should be destroyed; it's only natural. Furthermore, if you are ever not quite what you seem, you should declare yourself to be virtual.""A rule to remember!" roared the Red Queen. "Never make a mess without cleaning it up first.""You can ignore her," whispered the Dormouse, picking up the tea cake Alice had just set aside, "but you shouldn't cast away const so lightly."Alice began to feel that this new world she found herself in was not quite the same as the cozy sitting room she had just left."
"The complexity of C++ (even more complexity has been added in the new C++), and the resulting impact on productivity, is no longer justified. All the hoops that the C++ programmer had to jump through in order to use a C-compatible language make no sense anymore -- they're just a waste of time and effort. Now, Go makes much more sense for the class of problems that C++ was originally intended to solve."
"Now, there was a nigger, who came up with this idea: cout << "Hello" << endl;, well that's pretty niggerlicious."
"Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed."
"Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
"But you wonder whether it [C++] has passed beyond some threshold of complexity that's beyond mortals."
"Everyone has an individual background. Someone may come from Python, someone else may come from Perl, and they may be surprised by different aspects of the language. Then they come up to me and say, 'I was surprised by this feature of the language, so Ruby violates the principle of least surprise.' Wait. Wait. The principle of least surprise is not for you only. The principle of least surprise means principle of least my surprise. And it means the principle of least surprise after you learn Ruby very well. For example, I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprises me."
"And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++."
"I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details."
"In C++, reinvention is its own reward."
"C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance."
"C gives the programmer what the programmer wants; few restrictions, few complaints... C++ maintains the original spirit of C, that the programmer not the language is in charge."
"C++ is a badly designed and ugly language. It would be a shame to use it in Emacs."
"And you're right: we [the Java designers] were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?"
"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out."
"In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg."
"The major cause of complaints is C++ undoubted success. As someone remarked: There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
"C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog."
"I would try out the [C++] language [at AT&T] as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point, I said, no, no more. In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn't use it because it wouldn't stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language."
"[C++] certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it’s personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it’s not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, "I wrote it; here, take it." It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee. Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said "no" to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that."
"When the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research. The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++. [laughter] … [Returning to Go,] we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason."
"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it."
"In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap."
"If you want a fancier language, C++ is absolutely the worst one to choose. If you want real high-level, pick one that has true high-level features like garbage collection or a good system integration, rather than something that lacks both the sparseness and straightforwardness of C, and doesn't even have the high-level bindings to important concepts."
"C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs."
"A system composed of 100,000 lines of C++ is not be sneezed at, but we don't have that much trouble developing 100,000 lines of COBOL today. The real test of OOP will come when systems of 1 to 10 million lines of code are developed."
"When you’re programming C++ no one can ever agree on which ten percent of the language is safe to use. There’s going to be one guy who decides, “I have to use templates.” And then you discover that there are no two compilers that implement templates the same way."
"C++ is just an abomination. Everything is wrong with it in every way. So I really tried to avoid using that as much as I could and do everything in C at Netscape."
"I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby."
"Archetypes, color, and components will forever change how you build Java models. We build Java models with teams of developers. In our day-to-day mentoring, we develop and try out new ideas and innovations that will help those developers excel at modeling."
"Java is, in many ways, C++--."
"Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs."
"Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out."
"If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture."
"I fear —as far as I can tell— that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification."
"MediaWiki is a useful tool for supporting group collaboration but when we apply it to the academic setting, we need to consider and adapt some features to match the needs of the classroom environment, which requires mandatory collaborative writing."
"While there are many different wiki content-management systems available for free or fee, MediaWiki is one of the most robust and well-maintained systems available to wiki publishers."
"MediaWiki makes it very easy both to track changes to the pages of their sites, and to revert to older copies of the pages."
"MediaWiki is the most well-known wiki software because it is what runs WikiPedia. MediaWiki is simple to use and an excellent way to start collaborating on documentation or articles."
"A notable irony of Wikipedia's popularity is that the editing process of its supporting technology, MediaWiki, is complex to learn. Editing Wikipedia pages requires significant investment to learn MediaWiki's unique and powerful code structure."
"The main downside of publishing a site using MediaWiki is that it won't give you a great opportunity to use or improve your HTML skills."
"Clear your mind and build your collective offline memory using MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org), the same software that powers Wikipedia."
"MediaWiki is not as easy to use as web-based services, but it does have quite good functionality."
"MediaWiki is the most popular opensource software used for creating wiki sites."
"First released in 2002, MediaWiki is one of the top wiki engines and runs most of the wiki hosting sites. The name was a play on “Wikimedia,” and many people find it to be annoyingly confusing."
"MediaWiki (www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) is one of the best publishing wiki engines in existence."
"In Germany, we have a famous children's TV show called "Löwenzahn". It starts with a time lapse sequence of a dandelion flower breaking its way through the asphalt. This is what I've always associated with the MediaWiki logo, technology (brackets) being merely the basis for the growth of something wild and beautiful which transcends it."
"Some wiki engines try to represent functionality that's more CMS-like (e.g. complex workflows and access controls), while MediaWiki's functionality tends to be driven by the needs of open communities with minimal barriers to entry."
"APL is the first language not based on the lambda calculus that is not word-at-a-time and uses functional programming forms. Unfortunately, however, APL still splits programming into a world of expressions and a world of statements. Thus the effort to write one-line programs is partly motivated by the desire to stay in the world of expressions."
"APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums."
"The initial motive for developing APL was to provide a tool for writing and teaching. Although APL has been exploited mostly in commercial programming, I continue to believe that its most important use remains to be exploited: as a simple, precise, executable notation for the teaching of a wide range of subjects."
"There is a programming language called APL (an acronym for A Programming Language, how clever) that has more than a little Martian in it. APL was the first computer language I ever learned (on a major IBM mainframe), and when I learned it, I learned a little more than just APL.APL uses a very compact notation, including its very own character set, which bears little resemblance to our familiar ASCII. The character set has dozens of odd little symbols, each of which is capable of some astonishing power such as matrix inversion. You can do more in one line of APL than you can in one line of anything else I have ever learned since. The combination of the strange symbol set and the vanishingly compact notation makes it very hard to read and remember what a line of code in APL actually does."
"APL is a write only language."
"Rho, rho, rho of X Always equals 1 Rho is dimension, rho rho rank. APL is fun!"
"Smalltalk is dangerous. It is a drug. My advice to you would be don’t try it; it could ruin your life. Once you take the time to learn it (to REALLY learn it) you will see that there is nothing out there (yet) to touch it. Of course, like all drugs, how dangerous it is depends on your character. It may be that once you’ve got to this stage you’ll find it difficult (if not impossible) to “go back” to other languages and, if you are forced to, you might become an embittered character constantly muttering acerbic comments under your breath. Who knows, you may even have to quit the software industry altogether because nothing else lives up to your new expectations."
""Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children. (whispered:) Ruby. (laughter)"
"Yukihiro Matsumoto interview 2019 "What makes Ruby shine""
"A parser for things Is a function from strings To lists of pairs Of things and strings"
"Haskell is one of the leading languages for teaching functional programming, enabling students to write simpler and cleaner code, and to learn how to structure and reason about programs."
"Haskell is one of those languages that mathematician-type/minded people love! It's sort of a language for geniuses, by geniuses. So, you should probably know about it if only to be able to say "well, is this kind of like Haskell", and if so, you know you have to hire some very smart people to program in it. Haskell is sort of a modern-day Lisp, in that respect."
"Haskell, at its core, is simple: it is just a polymorphic lambda calculus with lazy evaluation plus algebraic data types and type classes."
"When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada!"
"C treats you like a consenting adult. Pascal treats you like a naughty child. Ada treats you like a criminal."
"For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past.... It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use."
"Beyond 100,000 lines of code you should probably be coding in Ada."
"If you're masochistic enough to program in Ada, we're not going to stop you."
"That is the great strength of PASCAL, that there are so few unnecessary features and almost no need for subsets. That is why the language is strong enough to support specialized extensions--Concurrent PASCAL for real time work, PASCAL PLUS for discrete event simulation, UCSD PASCAL for microprocessor work stations."
"Niklaus Wirth developed Pascal to provide features that were lacking in other languages of the time. His principle objectives for Pascal were for the language to be efficient to implement and run, allow for the development of well structured and well organized programs, and to serve as a vehicle for the teaching of the important concepts of computer programming. Pascal, which was named after the mathematician Blaise Pascal, is a direct descendent from ALGOL 60, which Wirth helped develop. Pascal also draws programming components from ALGOL 68 and ALGOL-W. The original published definition for the Pascal language appeared in 1971 with latter revisions published in 1973. It was designed to teach programming techniques and topics to college students and was the language of choice to do so from the late 1960's to the late 1980's."
"[ALGOL 60] is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors."
"[ALGOL W] was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL."
"The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think about programming and had a profound influence on my style."
"There is an appreciated substance to the phrase "ALGOL-like" which is often used in arguments about programming, languages and computation. ALGOL appears to be a durable model, and even flourishes under surgery — be it explorative, plastic, or amputative."
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
"The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery."
"Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever."
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
"A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors."
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
"[C has] the power of assembly language and the convenience of … assembly language."
"It has nothing to do with dinosaurs. Good taste doesn't go out of style."