Alan Perlis Quotes

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

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

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

Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.

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

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

Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

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

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

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

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

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no such thing as a free variable.

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.

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

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

Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

Any noun can be verbed.

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

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

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

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

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

In English every word can be verbed.

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

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

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

Optimization hinders evolution.

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

I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.

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

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