Lisp — made with secret alien technology
“The greatest single programming language ever designed.”
— Alan Kay, on Lisp
“Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.”
— Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"
“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.”
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
“Within a couple weeks of learning Lisp I found programming in any other language unbearably constraining.”
— Paul Graham, Road to Lisp
“Lisp is the most sophisticated programming language I know. It is literally decades ahead of the competition ... it is not possible (as far as I know) to actually use Lisp seriously before reaching the point of no return.”
— Christian Lynbech, Road to Lisp
“Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”
— Philip Greenspun
“We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?”
— Guy Steele, Java spec co-author, LL1 mailing list, 2003
“Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.”
— Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10
“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
“Lisp ... made me aware that software could be close to executable mathematics.”
— L. Peter Deutsch
“Lisp is a programmable programming language.”
— John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991
“Will write code that writes code that writes code that writes code for money.”
— on comp.lang.lisp
“I object to doing things that computers can do.”
— Olin Shivers
“Lisp is a language for doing what you've been told is impossible.”
— Kent Pitman
“Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.”
— Marvin Minsky
“Programming in Lisp is like playing with the primordial forces of the universe. It feels like lightning between your fingertips. No other language even feels close.”
— Glenn Ehrlich, Road to Lisp
“Lisp is the red pill.”
— John Fraser, on comp.lang.lisp
“The language God would have used to implement the Universe.”
— Svein Ove Aas, Road to Lisp
“Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me.”
— David Thornley, reply to a question older than most programming languages
“Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
— Alan Kay