Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.

The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining.

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

It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.

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.

My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

Computer programming has been traditionally seen as something that is beyond most people - it's only for a special group with technical expertise and experience. We have developed 'Scratch' as a new type of programming language, which is much more accessible.

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.

My duty as a teacher is to train, educate future programmers.

As software engineers trained to turn ambiguity into absolutes and fuzzy requirements into ones and zeros, we had a 'eureka' moment when we realized that our training had broader, real-world applications.

When we transcend we are diving into a field of unbounded creativity. This is real creativity and when we experience that and grow in that, we can more easily find solutions to problems. We can get ideas for whatever it is we're working on. And we will get happier by transcending every day and we will find that we're happier doing almost anything. We'll get more energy to do our work.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

It's [programming] the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.

Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

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

In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you've left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It's the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that's crippling you when you're trying to write.

It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

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

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