Rob Pike Quotes

At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.

Java the language is almost irrelevant. It's the design of the Java Virtual Machine. And I've seen compilers for ML, compilers for Scheme, compilers for Ada, and they all work. Not many people use them, but it doesn't matter: they all work.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

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.

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

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.

I would guess that the decision to create a small special purpose language or use an existing general purpose language is one of the toughest decisions that anyone facing the need for a new language must make.

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.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Realize you won't master data structures until you are working on a real-world problem and discover that a hash is the solution to your performance woes.

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

Every market we go to, we have a domain-specific language. Every domain-specific language, underneath, has an architecture.

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

PHP is rarely the bottleneck.

Well, I think Perl should run faster than C.

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."