Alan Perlis Quotes

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

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

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

11: If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.