Steve Yegge > Quotes

“huge mountain of poop, the biggest mountain you've ever seen, and your job is to crawl into the very center of it, every time you need to fix something.”
― Steve Yegge, A Programmer's Rantings: On Programming-Language Religions, Code Philosophies, Google Work Culture, and Other Stuff

“Bob Jervis, the original author of Turbo C, gave a tech talk recently in which he pointed out that even just the set of features the audience had asked for was a lifetime of work.

This phrasing resonated deeply with me. It was similar to my realization about 18 months back that I only have a small finite number of 5-year projects left, and I have to start choosing them very carefully. After writing my own "production interpreter", I realized that the work remaining was unbounded. I mean it. Unbounded.”
― Steve Yegge

“seven years after it finishes replacing C++, which evidently hasn't fully happened yet, mostly because Microsoft was able to stall it before it became ubiquitous on the desktop.”
― Steve Yegge, A Programmer's Rantings: On Programming-Language Religions, Code Philosophies, Google Work Culture, and Other Stuff

“Most Java folks at the time were shocked, and often too confused to be angry. Everyone else jeered and hooted and laughed it up, not knowing they were next.”
― Steve Yegge, A Programmer's Rantings: On Programming-Language Religions, Code Philosophies, Google Work Culture, and Other Stuff

“Matz took the best of list processing from Lisp, and the best of OO from Smalltalk and other languages, and the best of iterators from CLU, and pretty much the best of everything from everyone.”
― Steve Yegge, A Programmer's Rantings: On Programming-Language Religions, Code Philosophies, Google Work Culture, and Other Stuff

“Perl's marketing is so incredibly good that it makes you feel as if references are the best thing that ever happened to you. You can take a reference to anything! It's fun! Smells good, too!”
― Steve Yegge, A Programmer's Rantings: On Programming-Language Religions, Code Philosophies, Google Work Culture, and Other Stuff

“If you want to program conservatively, you need to live with the labels. Be proud and stand up for your beliefs!”
― Steve Yegge, A Programmer's Rantings: On Programming-Language Religions, Code Philosophies, Google Work Culture, and Other Stuff

“they're just like the Smalltalk folks, who waited forever to replace C++, and then Java came along and screwed them royally and permanently.”
― Steve Yegge, A Programmer's Rantings: On Programming-Language Religions, Code Philosophies, Google Work Culture, and Other Stuff