Programming Paradigms Quotes

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.

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.

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

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.

After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.

Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C.

There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion.

The key to a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms is not an exhaustive survey of every conceivable data structure and its subforms, with memorization of each's Big-O value and amortized cost.

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

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

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming.

I'd always thought that if Python was going to go on at all, it'd be nice to get into storylines.

The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages.

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

Java the language is almost irrelevant. It's the design of the Java Virtual Machine. And I've seen compilers for ML, compilers for Scheme, compilers for Ada, and they all work. Not many people use them, but it doesn't matter: they all work.

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining.