Top 74 Programming Language Quotes
#1. Computer programming has been traditionally seen as something that is beyond most people - it's only for a special group with technical expertise and experience. We have developed 'Scratch' as a new type of programming language, which is much more accessible.
Mitchel Resnick
#2. However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious.
Bjarne Stroustrup
#3. The most beautiful programming language in the world is useless unless it allows you to write the program that you need.
Axel Rauschmayer
#5. The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
Alan Kay
#6. I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [ ... ] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.
Rasmus Lerdorf
#7. The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!
Richard Stallman
#8. 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.
Linus Torvalds
#9. We think we're going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java.
Larry Ellison
#10. Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do.
Brian Kernighan
#11. I can follow pretty much every programming language out there, I can make a two-hundred-year-old diary out of some really nasty ingredients, I can even make sense out of the instruction booklets that come with IKEA furniture, but I can*not* make heads or tails of this nonsense right here.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#12. Habits, not ideas, are the programming language of human beings
Danny Dover
#13. The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
Dennis Ritchie
#14. The greatest single programming language ever designed
Alan Kay
#15. In this beginner-friendly book, called 'Learn to Program with Minecraft,' you will learn how to do cool things in Minecraft using the Python programming language. No prior programming experience is needed.
Mark Frauenfelder
#16. What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people - ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.
Larry Ellison
#17. When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.
Alan Perlis
#18. If there is ever a science of programming language design, it will probably consist largely of matching languages to the design methods they support.
Robert W. Floyd
#19. A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
Alan Perlis
#20. Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used. Anything is possible, anything can happen. On a flimsy ground of reality, imagination spins marvelous patterns.
August Strindberg
#21. A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
Edsger Dijkstra
#22. A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes.
Hal Abelson
#23. JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language.
Douglas Crockford
#24. XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.
Charles Simonyi
#25. People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.
Bjarne Stroustrup
#26. Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.
Fred Brooks
#27. A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
Alan Perlis
#28. A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.
Seymour Papert
#29. The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
Donald Knuth
#30. In 1989, I was awarded the Von Neumann Prize in Operations Research Theory by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. They cited my works in the areas of portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and the SIMSCRIPT programming language.
Harry Markowitz
#31. 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.
Richard Stallman
#32. To make a programming language powerful, you need to make it expressive. Having
Conrad Barski
#33. A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
Paul Graham
#34. What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.
Steve Wozniak
#35. PHP as an object oriented programming language should be judged by how well it does the job, not on a preconceived notion of what a scripting language should or shouldn't do.
Peter Lavin
#36. But, of course, the point of a programming language is that you don't just read it; you write it, too. You make it do things for you. And this, I think, is where Ruby shines ( ... )
Robin Sloan
#37. A data structure is just a stupid programming language.
Bill Gosper
#38. The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs [ ... ] and the proposal that the semantics of a programming language may be defined independently of all processors for that language, by establishing standards of rigor for proofs about programs in the language, appears to be novel.
Robert W. Floyd
#39. I felt there was a need for us to build a new programming language. I also had come to see that Microsoft functions best when it controls its own destiny.
Anders Hejlsberg
#40. A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't.
Raymond Simard
#41. Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.
Bertrand Meyer
#42. The precision provided (or enforced) by programming languages and their execution can identify lacunas, ambiguities, and other areas of potential confusion in conventional [mathematical] notation.
Kenneth E. Iverson
#43. 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.
Edsger Dijkstra
#44. Why would you have a language that is not theoretically exciting? Because it's very useful.
Rob Pike
#45. I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it's really a sign of affection, but I don't see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain.
Erik Naggum
#46. 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.
Herbert Schildt
#47. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
Eric S. Raymond
#48. Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty
Charles Stross
#49. I think that great programming is not all that dissimilar to great art. Once you start thinking in concepts of programming it makes you a better person ... as does learning a foreign language, as does learning math, as does learning how to read.
Jack Dorsey
#50. C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli.
Damian Conway
#51. Learning a language is not interesting than knowing how it works.
Ritesh Shrivastav
#52. I took a Logo programming class in fifth grade. Logo is a language specifically designed for the classroom environment. It was basically doodling through words.
Gene Luen Yang
#53. Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.
Douglas Crockford
#55. It has all the right ingredients: rich contents, friendly, personal language, subtle humor, the right references, and a plethora of pointers to resources.
Steven S. Skiena
#56. I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.
Yukihiro Matsumoto
#57. Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.
Eric Allin Cornell
#58. With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
Richard Stallman
#59. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
Alan Perlis
#60. Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only too sizes; too big and too small.
Richard E. Pattis
#61. Never hesitate to ask a lesser person.
Confucius
#62. The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought.
Kenneth E. Iverson
#63. Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.
Rob Pike
#64. SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.
Philip Greenspun
#65. Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better.
Derek Sivers
#66. Here 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.
Tony Hoare
#67. most obvious application of functions is defining new vocabulary. Creating new words in regular, human-language prose is usually bad style. But in programming, it is indispensable.
Marijn Haverbeke
#68. 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++.
Darl McBride
#69. My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.
Niklaus Wirth
#70. Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back.
Hakim Bey
#71. My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.
Richard Stallman
#73. But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.
Andrew Hunt
#74. The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
Alan Kay
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