Yukihiro Matsumoto Quotes

Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.

I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

Compilers resemble gluttonous eaters who devour excessive quantities of healthy food just to excrete them as refuse.

Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic - you run against people who can't change their minds.

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.

More good code has been written in languages denounced as "bad'' than in languages proclaimed "wonderful'' - much more.

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

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

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

Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.