Technology & Innovation: Coding & Programming Quotes

"I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998, around the time of the Mozilla announcement"

Andy Hertzfeld, Inventor

"Certainly, I get a lot personally out of it as well, there's the recognition and things like that, but mostly I try to take that as an opportunity to explain why I hope we could see more projects like Apache out there and why it's a good thing for society"

Brian Behlendorf, Scientist

"Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of 'Curses' makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of 'Hamlet', but none is planned"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large"

Graham Nelson, Mathematician

"I don't like programming. It's tedious"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"Ugly problems often require ugly solutions. Solving an ugly problem in a pure manner is bloody hard"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"PHP is rarely the bottleneck"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"I've never thought of PHP as more than a simple tool to solve problems"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"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"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day. It does the job. It is a simple tool. So what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"This is your silly web browser doing that. The file is correctly named"

Rasmus Lerdorf, Scientist

"Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero, actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose"

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Scientist

"We've broken the code base into logical chunks, called modules, and the foundation staff delegate authority for the modules to people with the most expertise"

Mitchell Baker, Lawyer

"We worked very hard to make extensions very simple"

Mitchell Baker, Lawyer

"The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity"

Mitchell Baker, Lawyer

"Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks"

Mitchell Baker, Lawyer

"I believe consistency and orthogonality are tools of design, not the primary goal in design"

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Scientist

"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"

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Scientist

"The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen"

Bill Joy, Businessman

"That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain"

Bill Joy, Businessman

"All of our code is open source, so it can be used for other projects"

Miguel de Icaza, Scientist

"People are different. People choose different criteria. But if there is a better way among many alternatives, I want to encourage that way by making it comfortable. So that's what I've tried to do"

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Scientist

"Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually"

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Scientist

"We have a very active testing community which people don't often think about when you have open source"

Mitchell Baker, Lawyer

"Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent"

Miguel de Icaza, Scientist

"Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do"

Paul Graham, Scientist

"After graduating in 1973, I went into the programming field"

W. Richard Stevens, Scientist

"Somebody gave me this drum machine and somebody else asked me to program something for a project. I really liked programming and I was really interested in using the drum machine"

Ikue Mori, Musician

"The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another"

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

"From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer"

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Scientist

"In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use"

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Scientist

"The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity"

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Scientist

"A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen"

Paul Graham, Scientist

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