Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Emacs. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Emacs Quotes And Sayings by 73 Authors including Larry Wall,Ken Thompson,Richard Stallman,Nick Parish,Fred Brooks for you to enjoy and share.
Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world
at least up until Haskell came along.
I am a programmer.
No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs.
Just as dogs often come to resemble their owners, it seems that programming languages end up reflecting the temperaments and personalities of their creators in some subtle ways,
A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.
Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.
I think Unix is a great system
especially for running data centers
because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.
Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.
I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.
As Mr. Nagle so competently points out, almost no one uses Eiffel; in fact until recently there were only 9 users. But now a 10th person just started, so we are holding a conference, appropriately titled the TENTH Eiffel USER conference, to celebrate.
A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.
If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work.
The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.
Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick
Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make.
Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
Go is such a refreshing language to program in, there is very little clutter just the stuff you need to get the job done
I write in code.
This is what it is to learn programming. You get to know your useful tools, then you look around, and there are some handy new tools nearby and those tools show you the bottomless horror that was always right next to your bed.
If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating system.
The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.
Unix, BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Windows are Monozukuri.
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.
Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable
People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
There are two ways of constructing a piece of software: One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no errors, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors.
It is formatted, and I'm tired of using vi. I get really bored.
Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.
C++ is an insult to the human brain
To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor.
It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits.
A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.
Beggars approached the task of trying to persuade perfect strangers to bear the burden of their maintenance with that optimistic vim which makes all the difference. It was one of those happy mornings.
Writing system software is like planning a family.If you make a mistake you have to live with it for 20 years.
I closely follow everything about user interface or human-computer interface: technology that makes computers closer to the way the human being actually functions.
If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran. If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases
I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces.
The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.
You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!
Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.
computer-majiggies,
Great programmers learn how to program their tools, not just use them.
Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension.
Think about what a user is going to type.
Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.
VI was predecessor to hundreds of word processing systems. By now, Unix folks see it as a bit stodgy - it hasn't the versatility of Gnu-Emacs, nor the friendliness of more modern editors. Despite that, VI shows up on every Unix system.
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
What was so special about the Mac, we all know, was the graphical computer interface.
I don't like creating software anymore. It's too exact. It's like karate; there's no room for error.
We all rely on technology to communicate, to survive, to do our banking, to shop, to get informed, but none of us knows how to read and write the code.
When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.
For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.
the book of 944 design guidelines for text-based user interfaces of bygone days that Smith and Mosier of Mitre Corporation developed for the U.S. Air Force (Mosier & Smith, 1986; Smith & Mosier, 1986).
Habits, not ideas, are the programming language of human beings
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
Please. Thank you. Learn it. Love it. Or be disappointed.
The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
We write programs not because we understand the syntax but to solve a problem
Beyond 100,000 lines of code, you should probably be coding in Ada.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
I think psychoanalyze-pinhead is the important lesson of GNU Emacs.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is an expert of understatement in his leadership of Linux development community. When eager programmers would ask him, '"What part of Linux should I work on?' his answer would usually be, '"Let me know when you find out' (p.286).
Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.
The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language.
It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly.
The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.
A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
C++ is a ridiculously complicated travesty that few have the excess IQ points to understand enough not to screw up massively.
This then is programming, both a tar pit in which many efforts have floundered and a creative activity with joys and woes all its own.
Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas
a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak.
You want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.
Whereas smaller computer languages have features designed into them, C++ is unusual in having a whole swathe of functionality discovered, like a tract of 19th century Africa.
The structure of a software system provides the ecology in which code is born, matures, and dies. A well-designed habitat allows for the successful evolution of all the components needed in a software system.
people need simple, secure, powerful, integrated, and user-friendly ways to create, consume, purchase, share, and manage their content.
The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.
I don't like programming. It's tedious.
The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.
Programming is usually taught by examples.
C++ is the best example of second-system effect since OS/360.
Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used. Anything is possible, anything can happen. On a flimsy ground of reality, imagination spins marvelous patterns.
I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.
Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.
A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.
My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.