Quotes about programming languages | Hacker News Reader

Quotes about programming languages

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It bothers me that the "quotes" are all whimsical, ha-ha jokes about some topic. They are punchlines, some even Low-Effort Content (Java is bad, Perl is unreadable.)

The quote from Tony Hoare about the null reference was an honest and interesting comment on the problems a language designer deals with - it might even offer some guidance.

In sharp contrast, Richard A. O'Keefe's comment on C++: "Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ?"

Less punchliney quotes, if that's the kind you prefer:

"Lisp is a programmable programming language." - John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele

"People 'get' types. They use them all the time. Telling someone he can't pound a nail with a banana doesn't much surprise him."

"I think it would be a tragic statement of the universe if Java was the last language that swept through." - James Gosling

"If everyone's going to reinvent a wheel, we might as well just provide the damn wheel as part of the stock system" - Dan Sugalski

"The thing that I really hate about Smalltalk, though, is the fact that every time I wish C++ or Java did something differently it turns out that Smalltalk does it the way I want it to. I've never even used Smalltalk on a real project. I just learned it so that I could read source code, now I keep running into things that would be easier if I were using it. It's really annoying." -- Phil Goodwin

"So, `bind' is `let' and monadic programming is equivalent to programming in the A-normal form. That is indeed all there is to monads" -- Oleg K

"In the end, I think that strong types is only one thing that makes Haskell programs work after compilation. The other ones are higher-order functions and purity. No type system can achieve what purity offers." -- Apfelmus

"For me, the heart of functional programming is exactly this separation between model and presentation. The former is naturally functional and compositional, while the latter is often imperative/sequential and not-so-compositional. IO belongs with the latter." -- Conal

And finally

"Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!" -- Edsger Dijkstra

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele

I always wondered which drug Steele was under when he wrote this, seen that Java is actually is less adaptable than C++. Not to say that I prefer C++ over Java, but it is strictly true that there are situations where you can avoid repeating yourself in C++, while you can't in Java, and not the reverse.

On the other hand, Java did bring acceptance for GCs and JITs, and significantly quiet the "can't use non-native" crowd.

'In sharp contrast, Richard A. O'Keefe's comment on C++: "Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?"'

In addition to dvdkhlng's post, I'd observe that C++'s core problem seems to be that it truly is the union of all fifty years of research... or at least, it tries to be, whether or not it's a good idea.

I thought it would have stabilized and settled down by now, but now it's trying to absorb pure functional programming, despite its general unsuitability for it. Not that it's giving up any other features, of course, it's just throwing the breathtakingingly complicated, yet still sort of half-assed functional features on to the pile.

Unfortunately, I feel Scala is headed the same direction, but faster.

I have the feeling that Scala is actually very elegant at it's core and that it manages to build a wide ranger of functionality upon a few primitives (x). Unfortunately, awareness of those "first principles" is not being put forward by the Scala community.

(x) A (perhaps poor) example of this is how it managed a great syntactic flexibility while having a smaller grammar than Java. (Of course you could point out that Lisp is even better in that regard, but it is to be understood that we actually want some syntax.)

Seems you haven't suffered through huge C++ projects making use of advanced C++ features. Try boost::lambda for one. Or read the C++ FQA (Frequently Questioned Answers) for an overview of C++ hell: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ . I think then you might see what Richard A. O'Keefe's comment refers to.

Thanks a lot, because this is infinitely more useful than a snarky, ha-ha quotes repeating age-old, Low-Effort jokes. I'll read up on what you referred to.

C: a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language. (MIT Jargon Dictionary)

SCNR

I think http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Programming_languages has a better list of programming language quotes. As this list, it contains a lot of ha-ha jokes, but at least it contains more of the "good" quotes too.

The take-away message being that everyone likes to complain about the languages they use, and even more about the languages they don't.

There are two kinds of languages, those that people hate and those that no-one uses.

A variation of this is actually the last quote from the linked page.

meta Wow, that ad at the bottom is sneaky. The first link is legitimate while the rest are ads.

COBOL and FORTRAN programmers, many of whom started out as BASIC programmers, did the work that paid the taxes that paid the grants that let Dijkstra sneer at them from his ivory tower. I say that he has done far more damage to the field than any of those languages.

Don't take anything Dijkstra says personally. I don't think he's ever said anything positive about any language, except perhaps Lisp, and even then it was just a 'this isn't horrible' more than a positive.

Wish I could find that quote.

EDIT:

Found it - http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-dijkstra-bl...

My favorite, from your link:

"[I]t has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."

oh , I learn a lot of language but I think C is the most useful language

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