Tony Hoare Quotes

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.

But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs.

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

Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.

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

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

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.

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.

Received wisdom is that if you spend time up front getting the design right, you avoid costs later. But the longer you spend getting the design right, the more your upfront costs are, and the longer it takes for the software to start earning.

Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.

We taught ourselves to simulate how microprocessors work using DEC computers so we could develop software even before our machine was built.

My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.

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

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

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

Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.