In English every word can be verbed.
ALAN PERLISWhen a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
-
-
To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
ALAN PERLIS -
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
ALAN PERLIS -
One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
ALAN PERLIS -
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
ALAN PERLIS -
Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
ALAN PERLIS -
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
ALAN PERLIS -
In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
ALAN PERLIS -
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
ALAN PERLIS -
We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
ALAN PERLIS -
If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
ALAN PERLIS -
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
ALAN PERLIS -
In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
ALAN PERLIS -
Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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 -
We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.
ALAN PERLIS