Richard Stallman Quotes

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

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

No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

Open-source is a means of production.

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

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

I don't think commercialization is the answer to anything. It's just one more facet of Linux, and not the deciding one by any means.

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

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

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.

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

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.

The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

More good code has been written in languages denounced as "bad'' than in languages proclaimed "wonderful'' - much more.

[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it.... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

C++ is my favorite garbage collected language because it generates so little garbage

I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully. Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh; "my name means the shape I am - and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.