Alan Perlis Quotes

If you see something that doesn't make sense, ask. Change it. Think about dollars, think about your soldiers' time, think about efficiency.

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.

But as someone pointed out earlier, it is not really about fairness; it is about taking finite resources and applying them where they will have the most effect.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

Everything has to be well thought out - what do you really need, when can you do with less coverage.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

People can come to me, and no matter how expert they are, I can virtually always see a way of doing something better.

Technology makes things faster and more cost-effective, but it's not perfect. It requires you to be as flexible as you can be.

To be intellectual does not require one to be alienated and oppositional.

Today nuclear weapons are a blunt instrument. Problems cannot be solved through bombs. They are of little use. We need logic.

What is it that the scientist finds useful in being able to relate a positive description of behavior to the solution of a maximizing problem? That is what a good deal of my own early work was about.

I've often thought of successful entrepreneurs as individuals who have just the right expertise - at just the right moment - to solve the emerging problems of their time.

It's a question of evidence-based politics. If you know that something does not work, you should not keep doing it.

Machines have the ability to assemble things faster than any human ever could, but humans possess the analytics, domain expertise, and valuable knowledge required to solve problems and optimize factory floor production.

Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.

An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how it can't be done.

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

I'm a logic monster, if things don't make sense I gotta make sense of them.

With method and logic one can accomplish anything.

Engineering isn't about perfect solutions; it's about doing the best you can with limited resources.

Like all Holmes' reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained. Dr. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes.

I just try to put as much logic into what I'm doing as possible and try to have fun with it.

Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.