Arguing Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.

— Donald Knuth

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

— William James

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

— Larry Wall

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

The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.

— Herbert Marcuse

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but…

— Hal Abelson

Abstraction is the enemy of meaning.

— Marshall Ganz

“A crassly arbitrary method can be avoided only when it is accepted that etymological statements are historical and not authoritative and that semantic statements…

— James Barr

Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery, rather than obvious description.

— Robert Genn

“Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it. Our applications are complex because we are ambitious to use our computers in ever…

— C.A.R. Hoare

We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.

— H. R. Haldeman

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

— Larry Wall