programming-languages

"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 (www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) is one of the best publishing wiki engines in existence."

"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 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."

"Clear your mind and build your collective offline memory using MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org), the same software that powers Wikipedia."

"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."

"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."

"Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs."

"Java is, in many ways, C++--."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In 30 years Lisp will likely be ahead of C++/Java (but behind something else)"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"And what defines a 'python activist' anyway? Blowing up Perl installations worldwide?"

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In 30 years Lisp will likely be ahead of C++/Java (but behind something else)"