Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, "My language is perfect. It can do everything." But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language - how we feel while programming.


Yukihiro Matsumoto

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it's use of language. We have at our disposal...
BARRY HUMPHRIES
It's as if Mom was expressing herself in a language other than English; a language that Grandma woul...
TESSA EMILY HALL
I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No langu...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No l...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theore...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Music is a language - and language, at its finest, should be music.
T.L. RESE
Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art. But it’s up to the artist to use language that can be ...
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to ...
HARRY MATHEWS
Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language.
JULIA GLASS
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a ...
REBECCA SOLNIT
The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language i...
EMIR KUSTURICA
Mother language at home, regional language in State, national language in Country, medium language a...
DEVASKI
I can see that 'Switched at Birth' is attracting audiences because of the diversity and the ...
SEAN BERDY
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
GEORGE ORWELL
We switch to another language-- not our invented language or the language we've learned from our liv...
DAVID LEVITHAN
Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to us...
ADA LOVELACE
In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person...
WILLIAM GOLDING
My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebrati...
EDUARDO GALEANO
A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a...
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The test of language is how well it can be translated into other tongues, and sex is the most negoti...
J.G. BALLARD
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about ...
BALTHUS
If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer ...
GUIDO VAN ROSSUM
We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.
DEBORAH TANNEN
I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utter...
ROLAND BARTHES
Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to hu...
DANIEL EVERETT
There is only one universal language; the language spoken by the heart…love.
DR NIRVADHA SINGH
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers,...
ROLAND BARTHES
There is no other language that gives success the courage to be loyal to you than the language calle...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say ab...
BALTHUS
Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own str...
ALFRED KORZYBSKI
English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what ...
GARRISON KEILLOR
Though we think, we speak using a different language, a language that we create using words.
AUSTIN GLEN MILLER
Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of o...
URSULA K. LEGUIN
Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criterion of being direct in relation to the pr...
IVAN CHERMAYEFF
Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public op...
RAY COMFORT
The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they...
KURT VONNEGUT
It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
ANTHONY DOERR
If it is true that there is an origin of language and if it is true that the origin of language is o...
PAOLO BARTOLONI
The Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language,...
DAVID SOUTER
It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most...
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed withou...
DONALD KNUTH
It is not the language but the speaker that we want to understand.
VEDA UPANISHADS
Better results will definitely be achieved by resorting to negotiations and using respectful languag...
HAMID-REZA ASEFI
Musicians speak the language of music, artists speak the language of art, I speak the language of th...
THUTHULA NAMHLA DLEPU
You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the ...
ARIEL DORFMAN
I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so m...
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
What I find interesting about it is the richness of the archive and the challenge of figuring out ho...
ANDREW GARRETT
I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.
STEVEN PINKER
'Arrival' talks very little about language and how to precisely dissect a foreign language. ...
DENIS VILLENEUVE
On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source ...
SAM SHEPARD
Why do they rate a movie "R" for "adult language?" The only people I hear using that language are t...
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Students who are English-language learners, many of them, not all, are likely to score better in mat...
JOEL SHAPIRO
Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's...
JESSICA LANGE
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a langua...
RICHARD RORTY
How to be perfect;Think nothing,say nothing & do nothing.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
There needs to be as much attention given to African-American children as there is to English langua...
CAROLYN PHILLIPS
We want them to be able to converse in the international language of commerce.
LORRAINE HUNT
We live in America, anyone that lives here should be able to understand 6th grade English or read at...
CORY COOK
Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks he can talk about language
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
When a Japanese manufacturer was asked by his North American counterpart, "What is the best language...
LEONARD I. SWEET
My mom, through family and other connections in the Miami Nation, found out about this language camp...
GREG TIPPMAN
Language and culture cannot be separated. Language is vital to understanding our unique cultural per...
BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE
If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it'...
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle la...
CONRAD HALL
English is an auditory language. ASL is a conceptual and visual language. It's not something that ca...
INA FAYE PRICE
The language of the heart
Is the only language
That everybody can understand.
SRI CHINMOY
My inspiration came especially in the 1950s through the Vienna Group founded by writer H.C. Artmann....
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
No matter where we come from, there is one language we can all speak and understand from birth, the ...
IMANIA MARGRIA
Acting in another language is great, and I've done that. But you can't do it as well as you ...
EMMANUELLE SEIGNER
Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only jus...
ISMAIL MERCHANT
Teaching a child to read, is like teaching someone a different language. You understand that they ar...
TALK2YOURBABY
They feel freedom with the language.
LAMIA KHALIQ
The Dollar & English language are one of a kind,while the dollar is the most preferred currency in t...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is o...
OSCAR WILDE
If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Tor...
DAVID NOVAK
If we have listening ears, God speaks to us in our own language, whatever that language be
MAHATMA GANDHI
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
ALAN PERLIS
It is true that students who are deaf struggle with the English language, especially with reading an...
JENNIFER HOWELL
So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They tha...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar...
RICHARD LEDERER
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
GEORGE STEINER
It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who yo...
FRED FRITH
The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of ...
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - t...
MATTHEW SHIPP
The play is more about their struggle, their battle, ... It's also playing with what language is and...
STEPHEN SACHS
You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.
GEOFFREY WILLANS AND RONALD SEARLE
I think that what computers have done is just disastrous to the language.
GARY PAULSEN
Acting is not my language at all.
MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV
I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act ...
NTOZAKE SHANGE
Body language is more fascinating to me than actual language.
MICHELLE YEOH
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
GEORGE ORWELL
We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
SLAVOJ ŽIžEK
There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written...
EUGENE H. PETERSON
I wanted to see everything. It was around the time I acquired language, or even before that time, wh...
JOY HARJO
BASIC - A programming language.
ANON.
Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be pa...
JOSHUA COHEN
Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The wonderful thing about writing for theatre is you can go anywhere you want with the language. The...
SAM SHEPARD
Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose styli...
TOMMY LEE JONES
Ultimately it is our objective to provide a language-specific development center for every language ...
JEFFERY MCMANUS

More Yukihiro Matsumoto

Most of the tasks we do are for humans. For example, a tax calculation is counting numbers so the go...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Imagine you are writing an email. You are in front of the computer. You are operating the computer, ...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, h...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
People are different. People choose different criteria. But if there is a better way among many alte...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theore...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
I want to solve problems I meet in the daily life by using computers, so I need to write programs. B...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No langu...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
You want to enjoy life, don't you? If you get your job done quickly and your job is fun, that's good...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limi...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text pr...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited tha...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Sometimes people jot down pseudo-code on paper. If that pseudo-code runs directly on their computers...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No l...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
I believe consistency and orthogonality are tools of design, not the primary goal in design.
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt th...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone fel...
YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO
Thanks to robust capital spending here and in Asia, notably in China, Korea and Taiwan, our sales in...
YUKIHIRO SATO
Japan's power-generation equipment business, including nuclear power plants, has been shrinking as p...
YASUHIRO MATSUMOTO
Pretty much the only variable factors I can see in [the midterm plan] are fuel costs. For JAL to tur...
YASUHIRO MATSUMOTO
The referee told me he ruled it a joint possession, That's a good question.
DANIEL MATSUMOTO
I don't think Honda's solar-panel business will ever make economic sense, or be a large money loser ...
YASUHIRO MATSUMOTO
They were pumped up all week in practice.
DANIEL MATSUMOTO
We needed to make the tackles (in the second half), obviously. Their running backs ran well on us.
DANIEL MATSUMOTO
George is pretty quick and athletic. Our defense really played tough.
DANIEL MATSUMOTO
And how we can play our part in taking care of our environment so we can continue to have the beauti...
LISA MATSUMOTO