Neal Stephenson Quotes

People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

I am a programmer.

I'd always thought that if Python was going to go on at all, it'd be nice to get into storylines.

I started to write a new editor not too long ago and had it about half done after two days.

Software is the language of automation.

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.

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

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer.

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

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

People are still crazy about Python after twenty-five years, which I find hard to believe.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

I'm a tech geek.

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.

If software's the only thing in your bag of tools, I'm not going to give you great odds.

Code writers, they are my idols.

I don't program, so I don't belong in Silicon Valley. If I did belong in Silicon Valley, I'd be there creating a revolutionary compression algorithm for billions of dollars.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I'll never be hands-on on anything except software.

One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.