Tony Hoare Quotes

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

I was a little bit ahead of my time.

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

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

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

We must plow through the whole of language.

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.

I don't like the word ['classic']. It makes you think we didn't do any work.

Japan is really advanced. They don't go to the beach. The beach comes to them.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

I hate to be the person that's like, "We're doing something that's never been done before."

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

I don't like to say something's weird when it's innovative and fresh.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.