Top 15 Alan Perlis Quotes

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

57: It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

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

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

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

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.