Alan Perlis Quotes

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

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.

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

After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.

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

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

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

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do.

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

I didn't do programming language stuff in college at all.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

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.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

C++ is a pile of crap.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!