A couple good quotes about programming languages

I like the following two quotes about programming languages.

The first was referenced by user wychen in a post on our discussion forums (to highlight why someone should elevate the expression level of their design. wychen's comment was: "It would be much more meaningful if you can design your hardware in a bluespec way. If you want to learn from examples, the MIT WiFi/WiMax design is a better starting point than the MIT H.264 design. The H.264 one seems pretty much like RTL and doesn't make full use of these advantages provided by bluespec."). wychen also included this quote in his post:

"Language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing"

by Alan Perlis

The second was referenced by Nikhil, our CTO, in a comment he had made on Ron Wilson's recent editorial, How languages influence design, and why we should care: a tale of C, Verilog, and trouble:

The quote is from a great mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in his book "Introduction to Mathematics":

“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race. Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that ... a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility ... Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the gradual discovery of a perfect notation. [...] By the aid of symbolism, we can make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically, by the eye, which otherwise would call into play the higher faculties of the brain.”

The example of how a change to the notation of numbers drastically changed what people are capable of doing is very powerful -- and illustrative of what good languages should be capable of.