Alan Perlis Quotes

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.

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.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

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

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

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.

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity.

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

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

I was a programmer.

I worked as a programmer for 16 years.

Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There's a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.

Once computers can program, they basically take over technological progress because already, today, the majority of technological progress is run by software, by programming.

My first introduction to computers and computer programming came during my freshman year of college. I majored in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science, so I learned during my required courses at Vanderbilt University.

Before coming to Congress, I worked as a computer programmer and a systems analyst.

I got my first computer at the age of 6. To me, it was magic. By the time I was 12, I wanted to know the secrets behind the wizardry, and that started my journey toward computer programming. This was the early 1990s, when computers weren't built for the mass market.

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

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.

I think everyone should learn how to code.