A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
ALAN PERLISIn computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
-
-
We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
ALAN PERLIS -
In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
ALAN PERLIS -
To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
ALAN PERLIS -
Optimization hinders evolution.
ALAN PERLIS -
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
ALAN PERLIS -
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 PERLIS -
There is no such thing as a free variable.
ALAN PERLIS -
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
ALAN PERLIS -
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
ALAN PERLIS -
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
ALAN PERLIS -
If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
ALAN PERLIS -
Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
ALAN PERLIS -
If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
ALAN PERLIS -
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn’t.
ALAN PERLIS -
One can only display complex information in the mind.
ALAN PERLIS