Quotes by Alan Perlis

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

“If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.”

“A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.”

“Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.”

“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 ...”

“In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.”

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

“Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.”

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

“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...”

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

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

“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 un...”

“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. [...] W...”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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