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.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

In English every word can be verbed.

Optimization hinders evolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Any noun can be verbed.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

There is no such thing as a free variable.

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.