Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

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.

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

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."

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.

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful - many more.

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.

My impression was and is that many programming languages and tools represent solutions looking for problems, and I was determined that my work should not fall into that category. Thus, I follow the literature on programming languages and the debates about programming languages primarily looking for ideas for solutions to problems my colleagues and I have encountered in real applications. Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies.

To the extent that language forces experiences into categories it is a screen between reality and the human being. In a word, we pay for its benefits... Therefore, while using language, as we must of necessity, we should be aware of its shortcomings.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.

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

A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming.

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

When we first started with Apple computers, it was my dream that everyone would learn to program, and that was how they'd use their computer.