Alan Perlis

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

— Alan Perlis

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

— Alan Perlis

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

— Alan Perlis

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

— Alan Perlis

Both knowledge and wisdom extend man's reach. Knowledge led to computers, wisdom to chopsticks.

— Alan Perlis

There is an appreciated substance to the phrase "ALGOL-like" which is often used in arguments about programming, languages and computation. ALGOL appears to be a durable model, and even flourishes under surgery — be it explorative, plastic, or amputative.

— Alan Perlis

The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. [...] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control.

— Alan Perlis

This language [LISP] induces humorous arguments among programmers, often being damned and praised for the same feature.

— Alan Perlis

Programmers should never be satisfied with languages which permit them to program everything, but to program nothing of interest easily.

— Alan Perlis

Computer science is a restless infant and its progress depends as much on shifts in point of view as on the orderly development of our current concepts.

— Alan Perlis