Coins Quote by Alan Kay

“Modernism was based on a kind of arrogance ... and led designers to believe that if they thought of something cool, it must be…

— Larry Wall

“I’d learned over time that engineers preferred a straightforward question with a quantifiable answer. Open-ended designing, on the other hand, was the realm of…

— B.V. Larson

The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming…

— Richard Stallman

Overemphasis of efficiency leads to an unfortunate circularity in design: for reasons of efficiency early programming languages reflected the characteristics of the early computers,…

— Kenneth E. Iverson

We worked very hard to make extensions very simple.

— Mitchell Baker

Good design today requires more vision (a larger point of view versus the single brilliant idea), more consistency (a deeper underlying structure of language…

— William Drenttel

Design is a dreadful form of expression

— Philippe Starck

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it.... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs,…

— Tony Hoare

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty…

— Fred Brooks

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

— Anonymous

Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour.…

— John Naughton

The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity…

— Randall E. Stross