Dennis Ritchie Quotes

Java is C++ without the guns, clubs and knives.

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.

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

Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C.

If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.

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.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

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

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.

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.

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

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.

Developers, developers, developers...

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

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.

The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

I used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I'm now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy.

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.