Eric S. Raymond Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.

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

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.

As you go out to the 2040s, now the bulk of our thinking is out in the cloud. The biological portion of our brain didn't go away but the nonbiological portion will be much more powerful. And it will be uploaded automatically the way we back up everything now that's digital.

If you’re too rigid in your thinking you may miss some wonderful opportunities for storytelling.

I don't think I would ever be a doctor, but the reason I majored in science was because you could become a civil engineer, you could become a biologist, you could become a computer scientist - that was the point of it. I had no idea what I wanted to do. In my last two years of high school here happened to be these few scripts that I really responded to. Eventually, I landed the job, and that was something that I felt transcended whatever other people would think of me.

I think in doing stand-up there are no rules and there's no architecture.

I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.

I don't think it's important for everyone necessarily, and I totally respect that because everyone writes differently.

I think everything has to come from something that you feel comfortable with and want to be in and sometimes we try to negotiate that limit, but it's not always easy to find the right balance.

Tom [Cargil]s suggestion with a further idea: Propsers of new [C++] features should be required to donate a kidney. That would - Jim [Waldo] pointed out - make people think hard before proposing, and even people without any sense would propose at most two extensions.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

You have to look at the body of work you're doing and then figure out the best way for people to digest it. You want people to come in and listen to all of it and understand the entire project. I think it's bad when everyone's like, "This is how you have to do it."

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

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

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.

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

I've always kept my overhead low so I could do whatever I want. I think of myself as lazy with spurts of getting a lot done. I find myself rooting against things sometimes because I get excited at the thought of a clean slate.

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