Quotes

Our biggest mistake was using the scary term “monad” rather than “warm fuzzy thing”.
— Simon Peyton Jones
I remember being impressed with Ada because you could write an infinite loop without a faked up condition. The idea being that in Ada the typical infinite loop would be normally be terminated by detonation.
— Larry Wall 1
Ada language is a voice from thermonuclear hell, a curse to the humankind.
— Melor Sturua 2
Objects are state data with attached behavior; closures are behaviors with attached state data and without the overhead of classes.
— Peter Norvig
Given enough bugs, all eyes are shallow.
— Sad but true.
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
— Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming
Under no circumstances confuse the mesh with the interleave operator, except under confusing circumstances.
— D. Woods and J. Lyon, the INTERCAL reference manual
Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.
— R5RS
Software tends to live too long: just good enough to discourage replacement, but slowly rotting away with more and more problems that are hard to fix.
— John Ousterhout
Within the Oceans of Great Risk were many Sun Worshippers, and they had wanted to excel, and make their words perfect, and do their jobs as easy as one-two-three.
— unknown 3
I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are.
— unknown
If it hurts, do it more often.
— Martin Fowler
Live in the future, then build what's missing.
— Paul Graham
The future will be better tomorrow.
— Dan Quayle

1 This can give a wrong impression that you can't escape a loop in Ada. You can, either with “exit [when <condition>]” statement or by raising an exception. Otherwise it's true, “loop ... end loop;” creates an infinite loop, finite loops are created by adding a condition before the “loop” keyword.

2 This is from an article in a soviet newspaper that described the USA as an antiutopia. The author compared it to Orwell's Newspeak as if it was a constructed language, which suggests that he had little idea what a programming language is. Neither he knew that Ada was used in the USSR too.

3 It comes from this story which can be found on many websites without attribution, and I really would like to know who the original author is.

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