APL is a write-only language. I can write programs in APL, but I can’t read any of them. — Roy Keir
Do not allow [Ada] in its present state to be used in applications where reliability is critical i.e. nuclear power stations, cruise missiles, early warning systems, anti-ballistic missle defense systems.
— C A R Hoare
He who hasn’t hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart. He who does as an adult has no brain. — John Moore
When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada.
— Robert Dewar
Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp. — Paul Graham
And despite the occasional predictions that assembly language will be outlawed by the US government sometime this decade, it is likely that someone who is absolutely determined to sink to the lowest level of programming languages will be able to find an employer who will indulge his base instincts.
— Ed Yourdon
PL/I and Ada started out with all the bloat, were very daunting languages, and got bad reputations (deservedly). C++ has shown that if you slowly bloat up a language over a period of years, people don’t seem to mind as much.
— James Hague
BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.
— Seymour Papert
Other advanced languages, such as assembler and C, were not terribly complex in themselves, but the environments in which applications were developed were downright weird, with mines scattered about everywhere, ready to blow the inattentive programmer out of the water.
— Bruce Tognazzini
If you can’t do it in Fortran, do it in assembly language. If you can’t do it in assembly language, it isn’t worth doing.
— Ed Post