“With the increasing importance of standards for system-level objects such as COM and CORBA, it is particularly important that the C++ bindings to those be clean, well documented, and simple to use.”

The right to be irresponsible and stupid is something I hold very dear. And luckily it is something I do well.

And no, I’m not a walking C++ dictionary. I do not keep every technical detail in my head at all times. If I did that, I would be a much poorer programmer.

Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naive or a salesman.

Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code.

Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.

Personally, I look forward to better tools for analyzing C++ source code.

To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit

It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers.

C++ is my favorite garbage collected language because it generates so little garbage

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don’t have ideas or don’t have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn’t offer much help.

Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won’t get much smarter.

This evolution may compromise Java’s claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.

Java isn’t platform independent; it is a platform

I assume that a sufficiently skilled will be able to do anything not explicitly forbidden by the hardware.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.

When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

I have a few minor rules for myself but I break them all the time. For example, when translating from Romance languages to English, there is often a choice between a Latinate cognate and a Germanic equivalent.

Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Don’t use the language of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when talking about blood sugar numbers

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.

But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party – whose members for the most part come from the ghetto – seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people’s language.