programming-languages

"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

"A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors."

"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."

"[C has] the power of assembly language and the convenience of … assembly language."

"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."

"It has nothing to do with dinosaurs. Good taste doesn't go out of style."

"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."

"A parser for things Is a function from strings To lists of pairs Of things and strings"

"Beyond 100,000 lines of code you should probably be coding in Ada."

"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)"

"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing."

"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."

"C treats you like a consenting adult. Pascal treats you like a naughty child. Ada treats you like a criminal."

"Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people."

"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."

"The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery."

"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."

"Rho, rho, rho of X Always equals 1 Rho is dimension, rho rho rank. APL is fun!"

"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."

"Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people."

"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."

"I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby."

"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."

"[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."

"Yukihiro Matsumoto interview 2019 "What makes Ruby shine""

"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 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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby."

"[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."

"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."

"[ALGOL W] was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL."

"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."

"If you're masochistic enough to program in Ada, we're not going to stop you."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 write only language."

"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."

"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."

"MediaWiki is the most popular opensource software used for creating wiki sites."

"MediaWiki is not as easy to use as web-based services, but it does have quite good functionality."

"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."

"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."