James Gosling Quotes

I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.

You could summarize everything I did at Apple was making tools to empower creative people. 'QuickDraw' empowered all these other programmers to now be able to sling stuff on the screen. The 'Window Manager,' 'Event Manager,' and 'Menu Manager.' Those are things that I worked on that were empowering other people.

When it comes to .NET they've done a really outstanding job.

It's strategic for us - lots of people will develop applications in .NET.

One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.

Teaching someone to program is like giving them a superpower.

People will realize that software is not a product; you use it to build a product.

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.

Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality.

Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.

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

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

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

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.

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

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

At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.

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

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.