Stephen Wolfram Quotes

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

I'd always thought that if Python was going to go on at all, it'd be nice to get into storylines.

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

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

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.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

The most important precedents deal with the whole idea of symbolic programming - the notion of setting up symbolic expressions that can represent anything one wants, and then having functions that operate on both their structure and content.

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

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes.

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.

Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform

I think everyone should get a little exposure to computer science because it really forces you to think in a slightly different way, and it's a skill that you can apply in life in general, whether you end up in computer science or not.

The ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate all need for intelligent thought.

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

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.

Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

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.

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.