Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.

Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.

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.

Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.

To Perl , or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.

Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun

An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

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

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them.

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.

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

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

I like that confusion when people are speaking in the same language but still can't understand each other. It's also usually my experience of being in America - when I speak no one can understand what I'm saying.

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.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

The English language is not always the President's friend.

There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

[Perl] gives you the STDERR filehandle so that your program can make snide comments off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output.

I believe that the purpose of life is, at least in part, to be happy. Based on this belief, Ruby is designed to make programming not only easy but also fun. It allows you to concentrate on the creative side of programming, with less stress.

LISP has jokingly been described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer." I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.