Alan Perlis Quotes

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.

Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

I'm a great coder. But I am not pushing that so much anymore because there are thousands of great coders.

In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.

I don't like programming. It's tedious.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

Developers, developers, developers...

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

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

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

There's no such thing as a simple cache bug.

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.