I’m just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell. (Dennis Ritchie)

A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all. (Henry Ward Beecher)

Take a cup of coffee and add three drops of poison and what have you got? Microsoft J++. (Scott McNealy)

Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don’t work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero. (Paul Graham)

If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, Perl will give you ten bullets and a laser scope, then stand by and cheer you on. (Teodor Zlatanov)

Your development cycle is much faster because Java is interpreted. The compile-link-load-test-crash-debug cycle is obsolete. (James Gosling)

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)

Java is, in many ways, C++–. (Michael Feldman)

Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is the wrong tool for every job. (Bruce Eckel)

I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter…) (Larry Wall)

Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. (Keith Bostic)

C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce. (Scott McKay)

A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing. (Alan Perlis)

Java, the best argument for Smalltalk since C++. (Frank Winkler)

[Perl] is the sanctuary of dunces. The godsend for brainless coders. The means and banner of sysadmins. The lingua franca of trial-and-error hackers. The song and dance of stultified engineers. (Xah Lee)

Going from programming in Pascal to programming in C, is like learning to write in Morse code. (J P Candusso)

Java: the elegant simplicity of C++ and the blazing speed of Smalltalk. (Jan Steinman)

Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java’s designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. (Paul Graham)

High thoughts must have a high language. (Aristophanes)

There are undoubtedly a lot of very intelligent people writing Java, better programmers than I will ever be. I just wish I knew why. (Steve Holden)

If you learn to program in Java, you’ll never be without a job! (Patricia Seybold in 1998)

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. (Bjarne Stroustrup)