Linus Torvalds Quotes

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.

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.

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

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

More good code has been written in languages denounced as "bad'' than in languages proclaimed "wonderful'' - much more.

Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.

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

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

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

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

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

C++ is a pile of crap.

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.

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.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.