Bill Atkinson Quotes

Sun's role in the grand scheme of development is to work on the runtime environment and the APIs. The tools we produce are much more for systems programmers, not enterprise developers.

One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

Computers have become more friendly, understandable, and lots of years and thought have been put into developing software to convince people that they want and need a computer.

What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?

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.

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

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.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

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

This is a software-powered world.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

The autodecrement is not magical.

C++ is a pile of crap.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

It is a high bar to say that it's more fun than working on software because the work at Microsoft that both Melinda [Gates] and I did was thrilling. We were making breakthroughs and empowering people.

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer.

Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.