Nature Quote by Douglas Crockford

“We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of…

— Paul Graham

When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The…

— Steven Pinker

Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.

— Erik Naggum

Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both".…

— Donald Knuth

Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think…

— Larry Wall

“Today, whether we are doing algebra or playing with the computer, we are, in effect, benefitting from some inheritance of the quest for a…

— Umberto Eco

The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language,…

— Paul Vixie

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

— Noam Chomsky

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed…

— Noam Chomsky

The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the…

— Judith Martin

“Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists,…

— Russ Rymer

Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories.

— Pierre-Simon Laplace