Alan Perlis

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

116: 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.

55: LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

This language [LISP] induces humorous arguments among programmers, often being damned and praised for the same feature.

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

Both knowledge and wisdom extend man's reach. Knowledge led to computers, wisdom to chopsticks.

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

The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. [...] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control.

3: Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.

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

31: Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

75: The computing field is always in need of new cliches: Banality sooths our nerves.

Programmers should never be satisfied with languages which permit them to program everything, but to program nothing of interest easily.

Computer science is a restless infant and its progress depends as much on shifts in point of view as on the orderly development of our current concepts.

There is an appreciated substance to the phrase "ALGOL-like" which is often used in arguments about programming, languages and computation. ALGOL appears to be a durable model, and even flourishes under surgery — be it explorative, plastic, or amputative.