Alan Perlis Quotes

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

19: A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.

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

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

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.