Guido van Rossum Quotes

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field.

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.

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.

I am a programmer.

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.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.

If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.

This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.

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.

I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.

Code writers, they are my idols.

I don't program or code or anything like that.

I started programming Apples in seventh grade.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

I was a programmer.

Everyone on the founding team ought to invest the time in a coding bootcamp.

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

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

I used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I'm now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.