Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
ALAN PERLISSome programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
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We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.
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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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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.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
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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.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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