Alan Kay Quotes

I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

C++ is a pile of crap.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

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

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

Java is C++ without the guns, clubs and knives.

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.

I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.