Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
ALAN PERLISBecause of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
-
-
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
ALAN PERLIS -
Any noun can be verbed.
ALAN PERLIS -
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
ALAN PERLIS -
When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.
ALAN PERLIS -
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
ALAN PERLIS -
Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
ALAN PERLIS -
Is it possible that software is not like anything else.
ALAN PERLIS -
“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 -
C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
ALAN PERLIS -
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
ALAN PERLIS -
A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
ALAN PERLIS -
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
ALAN PERLIS -
Optimization hinders evolution.
ALAN PERLIS -
One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
ALAN PERLIS -
Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
ALAN PERLIS