Eric S. Raymond Quotes

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

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

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

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.

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

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

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

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.

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

I would guess that the decision to create a small special purpose language or use an existing general purpose language is one of the toughest decisions that anyone facing the need for a new language must make.

Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore.

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.

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.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

Every market we go to, we have a domain-specific language. Every domain-specific language, underneath, has an architecture.

Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.

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

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

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

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

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.

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