If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
ALAN PERLISIn English every word can be verbed.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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Optimization hinders evolution.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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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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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
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I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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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.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
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Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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Are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.
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Banality soothes our nerves.
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