Goals Quote by C.A.R. Hoare
““I have been giving the best of my advice to this project since 1975. At first I was extremely hopeful. The original objectives of the language included reliability, readability of programs, formality of language definition, and even simplicity. Gradually these objectives have been sacrificed in favor of power, supposedly achieved by a plethora of features and notational conventions, many of them unnecessary and some of them, like exception handling, even dangerous. ... It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use. The sponsors of the language have declared unequivocally, however, that there shall be no subsets. This is the strangest paradox of the whole strange project. If you want a language with no subsets, you must make it small.””
About This Quote
Source Article: “The Pragmatic Programmer”, 1999 (paraphrased)
Advocates simplifying programming languages by removing unnecessary features to improve reliability and safety.
In simple terms: Simplify languages for safety and efficiency.
Key Takeaway
Trim excess features for reliability.
Themes
software engineering
language design
simplicity
Mood
critical
reflective
Type
theoretical
advisory
When to use this quote
- designing a new language
- refactoring legacy code
- educational curricula
- policy making
Key Concepts
pragmatism
software safety
feature bloat
Questions to Reflect On
- Which features truly add value?
- How to convince stakeholders to prune?
A Different Perspective
Balancing power and simplicity is challenging.
![“How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.” quote by Rebecca Solnit](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/44d/rebecca-solnit-569_category_how-do-you-even-speak-of-let-alone-propo_1633528.jpg)
