Marvin Minsky Quotes

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

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

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

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

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.

The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.

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

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

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

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.

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.

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform

There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful - many more.

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.

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

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.