13 Quotes by Alan J. Perlis

I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. ... What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise of programs!

What's in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.

The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Every reader should ask himself periodically ``Toward what end, toward what end?'' -- but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.