Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn’t.
ALAN PERLISIt is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
-
-
In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
ALAN PERLIS -
A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
ALAN PERLIS -
A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
ALAN PERLIS -
To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
ALAN PERLIS -
Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
ALAN PERLIS -
Banality soothes our nerves.
ALAN PERLIS -
When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
ALAN PERLIS -
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
ALAN PERLIS -
You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
ALAN PERLIS -
In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
ALAN PERLIS -
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
ALAN PERLIS -
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 -
Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
ALAN PERLIS -
Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
ALAN PERLIS -
Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
ALAN PERLIS