Alan Perlis Quotes

#1. In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.

Alan Perlis

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

Alan Perlis

#3. Any noun can be verbed.

Alan Perlis

#4. In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word 'frustration'.

Alan Perlis

#5. Every reader should ask himself periodically "Toward what end, toward what end?" - but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.

Alan Perlis

#6. 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.

Alan Perlis

#7. Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

Alan Perlis

#8. One does not learn computing by using a hand calculator, but one can forget arithmetic. Perlis 1982

Alan J. Perlis

#9. It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

Alan Perlis

#10. In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.

Alan Perlis

#11. Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.

Alan Perlis

#12. The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

Alan Perlis

#13. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

Alan Perlis

#14. 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.

Alan Perlis

#15. In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

Alan Perlis

#16. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Alan Perlis

#17. Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

Alan Perlis

#18. In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.

Alan Perlis

#19. The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

Alan Perlis

#20. 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.

Alan J. Perlis

#21. If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

Alan Perlis

#22. LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

Alan Perlis

#23. In English every word can be verbed.

Alan Perlis

#24. C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

Alan Perlis

#25. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

Alan Perlis

#26. When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

Alan Perlis

#27. When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

Alan Perlis

#28. A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

Alan Perlis

#29. If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.

Alan Perlis

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

Alan Perlis

#31. To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

Alan Perlis

#32. We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.

Alan Perlis

#33. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

Alan Perlis

#34. One man's constant is another man's variable.

Alan Perlis

#35. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Alan Perlis

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

Alan Perlis

#37. Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

Alan Perlis

#38. Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.

Alan Perlis

#39. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

Alan Perlis

#40. There is no such thing as a free variable.

Alan Perlis

#41. A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Alan Perlis

#42. Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Alan Perlis

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

Alan Perlis

#44. Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Alan Perlis

#45. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Alan Perlis

#46. Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

Alan Perlis

#47. One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.

Alan Perlis

#48. The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.

Alan J. Perlis

#49. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Alan Perlis

#50. There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

Alan Perlis

#51. 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.

Alan Perlis

#52. If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.

Alan Perlis

#53. I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

Alan Perlis

#54. FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

Alan Perlis

#55. In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

Alan Perlis

#56. Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

Alan Perlis

#57. It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.

Alan Perlis