James Gosling Quotes

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

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.

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.

Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages.

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."

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

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.

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

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

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.

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.

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.

If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls.

Yes, I definitely believe that it has some good cross-platform properties. Object orientation was one of the techniques I used to make Python platform independent.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs.

Computers are really, basically, computing elements and a lot of memory. They are pretty easy to understand, as compared to the brain, which was designed by evolution.

The world was made before English language, and seemingly upon a different design.

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