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 PERLISBecause of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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One can only display complex information in the mind.
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That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house.
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Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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