Terry Pratchett Quotes

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

The IIc was Apple's first crack at a 'portable' computer, which it sort of was if you didn't mind a 7.5 pound weight, plus monitor, external floppy drive, and all the cables.

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

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.

Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers.

Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s.

I used to collect computer punch cards from the data centers.

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

Windows 95 had its 20th anniversary last year, so we got our hands on an old system and showed it to teenagers who were not even alive in 1995. The results were pretty great and also makes you feel quite old.

Electronics are getting more and more accessible now - you don't have to be an engineer to start building things.

When I was 13, I thought I was pretty hot stuff because I knew BASIC programming, self-taught on the family's Commodore 64. One of my crowning accomplishments was writing a silly little program that showed a crudely-drawn Space Shuttle lifting off in a cloud of pixelated smoke.

I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all.

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

Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better.

I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

Why would you have a language that is not theoretically exciting? Because it's very useful.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

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

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.