Alan Perlis Quotes

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought.

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

A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

Language does our thinking for us.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

Those who have reflected on the powerful influence of language on thought will perceive in how different a manner people who speak in different languages are apt to think.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around them."

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

Was it really so far-fetched to think that words had a way of shaping a person's whole life?

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform

Words are in this respect like water, that they often take their taste, flavour, and character, from the mouth out of which they proceed, as the water from the channel through which it flows.

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.