Alan Perlis Quotes

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

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

39: 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

80: Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa.