Guido van Rossum Quotes

When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

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.

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

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.

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

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.

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

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

I have never designed a language for its own sake.

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

It’s the toughest decision a president has to make, by far. There is no passing the buck, no sharing the responsibility. It is a terribly lonely decision.

I don’t want you to be a laughing stock … a circus where we just throw people out the minute they make a tough decision. Don’t do this. Don’t do this.

In TV, when you come in to direct an episode, you are effectively learning an established language; you then have to try to learn to speak it really well. But on a movie, you are the guy. You are creating the language; you make most of the decisions.

I had to decide between doing 'Issaq' and continuing school and I chose 'Issaq.'

At 17, I realized that it's going to be a tough decision to make, but I had the clarity of thought to walk out of cricket and try my luck in acting.

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

Some shots, for me, are a good shot even if it's forced. The way it might look to a person watching, they might look at it like, 'That's a tough shot.' But for me, it's not a tough decision. I'm committed to those shots, and I spend time working on them.

There was a point where I was leaving for California when I was 22. It was a tough decision to make because, at that time, my mother and father both ran a successful chain of women's lingerie stores in metro Detroit. Two were called Bra World, and two were called Lulu's Lingerie. They were great. They did well.

Spain is such a competitive league, and for the players to give up La Liga, it's such a tough decision.

It was a very long and hard decision. My dad kept telling me, 'You can always go to college, but you can't always go pro.' That made sense to me.

Being the founding member of Loser, my decision to leave was not an easy one.

It's a really hard decision, picking my second single.

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.