Alan Perlis Quotes

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

One man's constant is another man's variable.

Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

Optimization hinders evolution.

C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

In English every word can be verbed.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.

In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.

Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

Any noun can be verbed.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.

There is no such thing as a free variable.

In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.

Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.

One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.

One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.