Alan Perlis Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

101 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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