Charles Simonyi Quotes

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

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

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

Software is the language of automation.

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

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

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

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

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

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

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.

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

I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is.

The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.

In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?

Big-endians and small-endians.

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

Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case." --

Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.