Language Semantics Quotes

Let's not confuse the words immigrant and alien.

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

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

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.

Good morning is a contradiction of terms.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.

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

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are the same word.

Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages.