Alan Perlis Famous Quotes
Reading Alan Perlis quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Alan Perlis. Righ click to see or save pictures of Alan Perlis quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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.
Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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.
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
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.
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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?
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
There is no such thing as a free variable.
Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
The computing field is always in need of new cliches.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
In English every word can be verbed.
A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
