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Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
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"We've got to start over from scratch" - Well, that's almost any academic language you find.
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"English phrases" - Well, that's Cobol. You know, cargo cult English. (laughter)
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"Text processing doesn't matter much" - Fortran.
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"Simple languages produce simple solutions" - C.
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"If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C" - That's almost a direct quote from the original awk page.
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"I thought of a way to do it so it must be right" - That's obviously PHP. (laughter and applause)
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"You can build anything with NAND gates" - Any language designed by an electrical engineer. (laughter)
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"This is a very high level language, who cares about bits?" - The entire scope of fourth generation languages fell into this... problem.
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"Users care about elegance" - A lot of languages from Europe tend to fall into this. You know, Eiffel.
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"The specification is good enough" - Ada.
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"Abstraction equals usability" - Scheme. Things like that.
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"The common kernel should be as small as possible" - Forth.
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"Let's make this easy for the computer" - Lisp. (laughter)
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"Most programs are designed top-down" - Pascal. (laughter)
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"Everything is a vector" - APL.
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"Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children. (whispered:) Ruby. (laughter)
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"Everything is a hypothesis" - Prolog. (laughter)
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"Everything is a function" - Haskell. (laughter)
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"Programmers should never have been given free will" - Obviously, Python. (laughter)

 

Larry Wall

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To the designer of programming languages, I say: unless you can support the paradigms I use when I program, or at least support my extending your language into one that does support my programming methods, I don't need your shiny new languages. [...] To persuade me of the merit of your language, you must show me how to construct programs in it.

 

Robert W Floyd

 

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

 

John Backus

 

As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

 

Larry Wall

 

A "new" language that differs from the rest of the crop by one or a couple features is proof positive that both what it came from and what it has become are mutations about to die. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of such "languages" that people have invented over the years, for all sorts of weird purposes where they just could not use whatever language they were already using, could not extend it, and could not fathom how to modify its tools without making a whole new language. They never stopped to think about how horribly wasteful this is, they just went on to create yet another language called Dodo, the Titanic, Edsel, Kyoto-agreement …

 

Erik Naggum

 

The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.

 

Russell Baker