Paul Graham Quotes

Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.

I always considered programming as being like modern-day wizardry. You could think of things in your mind and then make them happen.

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.

I didn't do programming language stuff in college at all.

Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility.

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!

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

Anytime you put a challenge out there, people come up with a creative solution on the software side.

You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity.