>I am a strong believer in C++ and think it has a place in the universe.Yup. On the business end of a black hole ;-) http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2003-December/071143.html A UML diagram can't push 500 pages per minute through a RIP. http://www.baus.net/doersandtalkers.html All editor programmers are deemed to re-create emacs again, unless they're writing emacs. http://www.secretgeek.net/metanote_1.asp Samir And as a result we find that object-oriented languages have succumbed to static thinkers who worship perfect planning over runtime adaptability, early decisions over late ones, and the wisdom of compilers over the cleverness of failure detection and repair. http://dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveFailedNarrative.html Richard P. Gabriel Any sufficiently large C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally- specified, bug-ridden, slow implimentation of half of Common Lisp. Philip Greenspun Because nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me, but there is only one of me, right? https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcript Linus Torvalds C combines the power of assembler language with the convenience of assembler language. C++ is dumb, and you can't write smart systems in a dumb language. Languages shape the world. Dumb languages make for dumb worlds. http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/tour-de-babel.html Choosing between C# and VB.NET isn't a meaningful choice. It's like choosing between .NET Pepsi and .NET Coke. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000519.html CPU-cycles are cheap, people-cycles are not. Tucker Withington Customers that want software at the lowest rate possible are not customers that want software that helps them solving problems. http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/page/lars/20050412#pair_programming Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. Brian W. Kernighan Don’t blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for ‘the average programmer’, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra everything is fast for small n http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000957.html Guido, like me, believes in being correct before being fast. Terry Reedy in <mailman.300.1115744869.29826.python-list@python.org> Hackers do it with fewer instructions. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language -our basic tool, mind you!- already escapes our intellectual control. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra I cannot think of a medium more pregnant with possibilities, more laden with powerful and beautiful abstractions, than algorithm design. http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/nls_ebiz_picasso060509/index.html I love the smell of geek rage in the morning. http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=61651 I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it. I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention.... Its their 'ideas' that appeal to me. Thomas Alpha Edison I suggested holding a "Python Object Oriented Programming Seminar", but the acronym was unpopular. Joseph Strout If C is the closest language to modeling how computers work, Lisp is the closest to modeling how computation works. http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/tour-de-babel.html If I wanted my Java code to look and read like C/C++, I'd be writing C#. http://saloon.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=008564 If someone set off a bomb in this room, it would wipe out half of the worldwide Lisp community. That might not be a bad thing for Lisp, because it would have to be reinvented. John McCarthy If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime. If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one? Tom Cargill Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation. Bertrand Meyer It seems as if Java was built to keep a developer from shooting himself in the foot. It seems as if C# was built to give the developer a gun but leave the safety turned on. And it seems as if when C++ was built, they just handed the programmer a fully loaded bazooka with an open-ended license to use it. from the MSDN Jesus saves, Buddha does incremental backups. http://byzero.de/zitate/ Just like C, C++ is a good low-level language. Just like C, C++'s problems really start when you want to (ab)use it for high level stuff... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2003-December/071143.html Let's just hope that all the world is run by Bill Gates before the Perl hackers can destroy it. http://groups.google.no/group/comp.emacs/msg/9ab7f3307363849a Erik Naggum Make it work. Make it right. Make it beautiful. Make it fast. http://www.gungfu.de/facts/wiki/Main/PrematureOptimization One could argue that the computer revolution was both the only successful revolution of the sixties as well as the one that has changed world society the most. http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/revolutions_of_the_sixties.php Only 2% of the population can read source code. (And free software doesn’t matter if no one can read it!) http://www.eriksmartt.com/blog/archives/323 Perhaps you have forgotten that this is an engineering discipline and not some sort of black magic. Mark Jason Dominus Polymorphism in Python is a solution looking for a problem. Dan Sommers in <m2wtq4xkr3.fsf@unique.fully.qualified.domain.name.yeah.right> Programming in Basic causes brain damage. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra Python is a little weak in forcing encapsulation. It isn't made for bondage and domination environments. Paul Prescod Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation. (It also happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.) Sriram Srinivasan in Advanced Perl Programming Python is executable pseudocode. Perl is executable line noise. http://64.78.49.204/pub/eckel/LovePython.zip Q: how does a unix guru have sex?A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;fsck;fsck;fsck;umount;sleep So in C++ 'this' is an argument too, except you don't pass it in the normal way, you pass it in the object dot blah crap. Dan Manthey Software doesn't work, and hardware is unreliable. If you wait for a guarantee that nothing will go wrong, you'll end up being my age in a just a few dozen short decades, but without the rollicking good memories that make me such an agreeable old fart . Tim Peters Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems. Jamie Zawinski, on comp.lang.emacs str->str_pok |= SP_FBM; /* deep magic */s = (unsigned char*)(str->str_ptr); /* deeper magic */ Larry Wall in util.c from the perl source code Larry Wall The clumsiness of people who have to engage their brain at every step is unbearably painful to watch, at least to me, and that's what the novice-friendly software makes people do, because there's no elegance in them, it's just a mass of features to be learned by rote. However, this suits people a hell of a lot better than setting out at age 6 to become a great ballet dancer and achieving their goal 20 years later after every tendon and muscle and joint has been asked to perform just a little bit more than nature ever intended over and over and over again. To most people, this is insanity. But in reality, it's art, and it's the art in what we do that makes us human. http://groups.google.no/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab91864 Erik Naggum The longer it takes for a bug to surface, the harder it is to find. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roedy_Green There are two ways to try to make a software system reliable: make it so simple that it obviously has no bugs, or make it so complicated that it has no obvious bugs. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-October/345521.html Alex Martelli These languages will never be mainstream, because the mainstream would never see the benefits they provide. The mainstream would kill themselves with such power. There's a reason the mainstream likes manifest typing, procedural programming, and cut and paste methodologies, quite simply, it's all they can handle. http://onsmalltalk.com/languages-of-the-gods This is not a trivial exercise. And yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot if you aren't careful. But in the end, there's two kinds of programmers in the world: those with dangerous techniques and those who dig. Reg Braithwaite Reg Braithwaite This is Python! If we didn't care what code looked like, most of us would probably be hacking in some version of Lisp -- which already covered most of Python's abstract semantics way back when Guido was just a wee snakelet frolicking in the lush Amsterdam jungle. Tim Peters this is so alpha if you can't smell the bourbon you're sitting too far away from the screen UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. Doug Gwyn Well, If you don't know what it does, why did you put it in your code? Mark Jason Dominus When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html When your hammer is C++ everything starts to look like a thumb. windows: in trouble rebootlinux: in trouble be root http://byzero.de/zitate/ Ya, ya, ya, except ... if I were built out of KSR chips, I'd be running at 25 or 50 MHz, and would be wrong about ALMOST EVERYTHING almost ALL THE TIME just due to being a computer! Think about it -- when's the last time you spent 20 hours straight debugging your son/wife/friend/neighbor/dog/ferret/snake? And they still fell over anyway? E Tim Peters You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo! Mark Jason Dominus You need to build a system that is futureproof; it's no good just making a modular system. You need to realize that your system is just going to be a module in some bigger system to come, and so you have to be part of something else, and it's a bit of a way of life. Tim Berners-Lee, at the WWW7 conference You said "It didn't work," but you didn't say what it would have done if it HAD worked. Mark Jason Dominus