javasmalltak

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in. (((Larry Wall)))

If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. (Robert Sewell)

I fear the the new object-oriented systems may suffer the fate of LISP, in that they can do many things, but the complexity of the class hierarchies may cause them to collapse under their own weight. (Bill Joy)

Using Java for serious jobs is like trying to take the skin off a rice pudding wearing boxing gloves. (Tel Hudson)

Anybody who thinks a little 9,000-line program [Java] that's distributed free and can be cloned by anyone is going to affect anything we do at Microsoft has his head screwed on wrong. (Bill Gates)

Take a cup of coffee and add three drops of poison and what have you got? Microsoft J++. (Scott McNealy)

Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero. (Paul Graham)

Using PL/I must be like flying a plane with 7,000 buttons, switches, and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. (Edsger Dijkstra)

Thirty years from now nobody will remember Java and everyone will remember Microsoft. (Charles Simonyi)

If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, Perl will give you ten bullets and a laser scope, then stand by and cheer you on. (Teodor Zlatanov)

Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS. (Alan Kay)

Your development cycle is much faster because Java is interpreted. The compile-link-load-test-crash-debug cycle is obsolete. (James Gosling)

Actually, I'm trying to make Ruby natural, not simple. (Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto)

Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp. (Paul Graham)

When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, PL/I, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease. (Edsger Dijkstra)

The three characteristics of Perl programmers: mundaneness, sloppiness, and fatuousness. (Xah Lee)

PL/I, "the fatal disease", belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. (Edsger Dijkstra)

C treats you like a consenting adult. Pascal treats you like a naughty child. Ada treats you like a criminal. (Bruce Powel Douglass)

Java is, in many ways, C++--. (Michael Feldman)

Perl has grown from being a very good scripting language into something like a cross between a universal solvent and an open-ended Mandarin where new ideograms are invented hourly. (Jeffrey Davis)

LISP is like a ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it and it still looks like a ball of mud. (Joel Moses)

Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is the wrong tool for every job. (Bruce Eckel)

I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...) (Larry Wall)

I have found that humans often use Smalltalk during awkward moments. ("Data")

Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. (Keith Bostic)

PL/I and Ada started out with all the bloat, were very daunting languages, and got bad reputations (deservedly). C++ has shown that if you slowly bloat up a language over a period of years, people don't seem to mind as much. (James Hague)

C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce. (Scott McKay)

A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing. (Alan Perlis)

Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest. (Larry O'Brien)

In the best possible scenario Java will end up mostly like Eiffel but with extra warts because of insufficiently thoughtful early design. (Matthew B Kennel)

Java, the best argument for Smalltalk since C++. (Frank Winkler)

[Perl] is the sanctuary of dunces. The godsend for brainless coders. The means and banner of sysadmins. The lingua franca of trial-and-error hackers. The song and dance of stultified engineers. (Xah Lee)

Java is the SUV of programming tools. (Philip Greenspun)

Going from programming in Pascal to programming in C, is like learning to write in Morse code. (J P Candusso)

Arguing that Java is better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than tree bark. (Thant Tessman)

I think conventional languages are for the birds. They're just extensions of the von Neumann computer, and they keep our noses in the dirt of dealing with individual words and computing addresses, and doing all kinds of silly things like that, things that we've picked up from programming for computers; we've built them into programming languages; we've built them into Fortran; we've built them in PL/1; we've built them into almost every language. (John Backus)