Top 50 Alan Perlis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.”

— Alan Perlis

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2. “There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.”

— Alan Perlis

3. “A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.”

— Alan Perlis

4. “One man’s constant is another man’s variable.”

— Alan Perlis

5. “Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”

— Alan Perlis

6. “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.”

— Alan Perlis

7. “A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.”

— Alan Perlis

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8. “Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.”

— Alan Perlis

9. “Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.”

— Alan Perlis

10. “When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.”

— Alan Perlis

11. “Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.”

— Alan Perlis

12. “You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.”

— Alan Perlis

13. “It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.”

— Alan Perlis

14. “FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.”

— Alan Perlis

15. “If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.”

— Alan Perlis

16. “Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.”

— Alan Perlis

17. “Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.”

— Alan Perlis

18. “LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.”

— Alan Perlis

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19. “Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.”

— Alan Perlis

20. “Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.”

— Alan Perlis

21. “In English every word can be verbed.”

— Alan Perlis

22. “A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.”

— Alan Perlis

23. “In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.”

— Alan Perlis

24. “Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.”

— Alan Perlis

25. “In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.”

— Alan Perlis

26. “Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.”

— Alan Perlis

27. “Optimization hinders evolution.”

— Alan Perlis

28. “To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.”

— Alan Perlis

29. “There is no such thing as a free variable.”

— Alan Perlis

30. “If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.”

— Alan Perlis

31. “In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.”

— Alan Perlis

32. “In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.”

— Alan Perlis

33. “Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.”

— Alan Perlis

34. “A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.”

— Alan Perlis

35. “Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.”

— Alan Perlis

36. “In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.”

— Alan Perlis

37. “One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.”

— Alan Perlis

38. “Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.”

— Alan Perlis

39. “One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.”

— Alan Perlis

40. “In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.”

— Alan Perlis

41. “It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.”

— Alan Perlis

42. “In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.”

— Alan Perlis

43. “You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.”

— Alan Perlis

44. “We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.”

— Alan Perlis

45. “When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.”

— Alan Perlis

46. “Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?”

— Alan Perlis

47. “It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.”

— Alan Perlis

48. “We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.”

— Alan Perlis

49. “The computing field is always in need of new cliches.”

— Alan Perlis

50. “Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.”

— Alan Perlis