Philip Greenspun Quotes

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

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

My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.

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

One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.

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.

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."

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

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

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

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

I think the most annoying language is a tie between all the ones I don't know how to speak.

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory.

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

Everyone has to understand what we're saying to one another and there's no point in me thinking the line means this and the person I'm speaking to thinks it means something else. So there's a certain amount of analyzing of text that's of course necessary.

He who writes badly thinks badly

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

I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.

Welsh is now almost a national language in Wales. The Scottish dialects are reviving to some extent. I don't think it's a major thing, but it's there, and it's happening elsewhere.

I think all experience is, in some way, shape or form, filtered down to help you, in your present moment. With Shakespeare, you're trying to act with a fairly archaic language, although in certain aspects, it's deeply modern.

A man without words is a man without thought.

Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.