Quotes About Programming Languages

#1. Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only too sizes; too big and too small.

Richard E. Pattis

#2. 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.

Donald A. Norman

#3. In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.

Guido Van Rossum

#4. Most programming languages are decidedly inferior to mathematical notation and are little used as tools of thought in ways that would be considered significant by, say, an applied mathematician.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#5. For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.

Donald Knuth

#6. 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

#7. It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

#8. Just as dogs often come to resemble their owners, it seems that programming languages end up reflecting the temperaments and personalities of their creators in some subtle ways,

Nick Parish

#9. Overemphasis of efficiency leads to an unfortunate circularity in design: for reasons of efficiency early programming languages reflected the characteristics of the early computers, and each generation of computers reflects the needs of the programming languages of the preceding generation.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#10. 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

#11. With the computer and programming languages, mathematics has newly-acquired tools, and its notation should be reviewed in the light of them. The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable "native speaker" of mathematical notation.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#12. 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

#13. Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

Edsger Dijkstra

#14. 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

#15. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

Alan Perlis

#16. 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

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

Philip Greenspun

#18. Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better.

Derek Sivers

#19. In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

Alan Perlis

#20. My particular interest for the past couple of years has been to really think deeply about the big impendence mismatch we have between programming languages, C# in particular, and the database world, like SQL or, for that matter, the XML world, like XQuery and those languages that exist.

Anders Hejlsberg

#21. Q: Why bother doing proofs about programming languages? They are almost always boring if the definitions are right.
A: The definitions are almost always wrong.

- Anonymous

Benjamin C. Pierce

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The greatest single programming language ever designed

Alan Kay

#26. In English every word can be verbed.

Alan Perlis

#27. C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli.

Damian Conway

#28. Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.

Guido Van Rossum

#29. My programming language was solder.

Terry Pratchett

#30. 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

#31. I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#32. What I can't create I don't understand

Richard P. Feynman

#33. Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.

Larry Wall

#34. Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

Niklaus Wirth

#35. 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

#36. Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

Rob Pike