Programming Language Quotes & Sayings

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming. — Alan Perlis

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

All of us who attended the meeting - including Microsoft - unanimously agreed that unilaterally extending the Java programming language would hurt compatibility among Java tools and programs, would injure other tools vendors and would damage customers' ability to run a Java-based software product on whatever platform they wished. — James Gosling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why would you have a language that is not theoretically exciting? Because it's very useful. — Rob Pike

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. — Dennis Ritchie

Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back. — Hakim Bey

Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose. — Fred Brooks

Learning a language is not interesting than knowing how it works. — Ritesh Shrivastav

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic. — Rob Pike

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

Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better. — Derek Sivers

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

Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only too sizes; too big and too small. — Richard E. Pattis

Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages. The language called C is all harsh imperatives, almost raw computer-speak. The language called Lisp is like one long, looping sentence, full of subclauses, so long in fact that you usually forget what it was even about in the first place. The language called Erlang is just like it sounds: eccentric and Scandinavian. — Robin Sloan

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

C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli. — Damian Conway

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

To make a programming language powerful, you need to make it expressive. Having — Conrad Barski

A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking. — Seymour Papert

I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The logic should be straightforward to make it hard
for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to ease maintenance, error handling complete according to an articulated strategy, and performance
close to optimal so as not to tempt
people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations. Clean code does one thing well.

-Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++
and author of The C++ Programming
Language — Robert C. Martin

Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming. — Yukihiro Matsumoto

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits. — Edsger Dijkstra

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

Never hesitate to ask a lesser person. — Confucius

It is a free software program. You don't have to pay in order to download and install Python, or implement it on your application. Additionally, it will not cost you a thing to modify or redistribute this programming language, because although it is protected by a copyright, it is distributed with an open source permit. — Clarence Patterson

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

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

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

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

The most beautiful programming language in the world is useless unless it allows you to write the program that you need. — Axel Rauschmayer

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language. — Alan Kay

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

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

In English every word can be verbed. — Alan Perlis

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

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass. — Larry Wall

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

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

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

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

A data structure is just a stupid programming language. — Bill Gosper

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

However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious. — Bjarne Stroustrup

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

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop. — Alan Perlis

When you have done some programming then you'll know how satisfying it can be to use a program that you made yourself, one that does exactly what you want it to do. Creating a Sugar Activity takes that enjoyment to the next level. A useful Sugar Activity can be translated by volunteers into every language, be downloaded hundreds of times a week and used every day by students all over the world. — James D. Simmons

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

It is the role of the artistic coder to question the coding languages, both through self-reflection and by using them for unintended purposes. These coders introduce multiplicity where none existed and challenge definitions of intent for the entire environment of programming language, machine and system. — Stephanie Strickland

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend. — Eric S. Raymond

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

My programming language was solder. — Terry Pratchett

The discipline of programming is most like sorcery. Both use precise language to instruct inanimate objects to do our bidding. Small mistakes in programs or spells can lead to completely unforseen behavior: e.g., see the story, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". Neither study is easy: " ... her [Galinda's] early appetite for sorcery had waned once she'd heard what a grind it was to learn spells and, worse, to understand them." from the book "Wicked" by G. Maguire. — Richard E. Pattis

So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming. — Edsger Dijkstra

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

We often treat children as if they're not very competent to do anything on their own. So we make them stop learning in a natural way - by exploring. Logo [the computer programming language ] allows them to find their way around the computer, as they would find their way around the house, uncontaminated by the bureaucracies of schools. — Seymour Papert

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. — Alan Perlis

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

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

Living alone,' November whispered, 'is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn't overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being. — Catherynne M Valente

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

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

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

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

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

The greatest single programming language ever designed — Alan Kay

JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language. — Douglas Crockford

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

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

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess. — Ted Nelson

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

What I can't create I don't understand — Richard P. Feynman

Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision - so there will always be code. — Robert C. Martin

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. — Alan Perlis

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

XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language. — Charles Simonyi

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

Habits, not ideas, are the programming language of human beings — Danny Dover

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

I was really looking at computers as a way to understand the mind. But at M.I.T., my mind was blown by having a whole computer to yourself as long as you liked.I felt a surge of intellectual power through access to this computer, and I started thinking about what this could mean for kids and the way they learn. That's when we developed the computer programming language for kids, Logo. — Seymour Papert

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