76 Quotes by Alan Perlis

In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

One man's constant is another man's variable.

In English every word can be verbed.

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.

Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

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