A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
A good system can't have a weak command language.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing.
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
An adequate bootstrap is a contradiction in terms.
Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such thing as a free variable."
Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may revitalize the corner saloon.
Computation has made the tree flower.
Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
Computers don't introduce order anywhere as much as they expose opportunities.
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.
Documentation is like term insurance: It satisfies because almost no one who subscribes to it depends on its benefits.
Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
Editing is a rewording activity.
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn't.
Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits.
Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught not to. So it is with great programmers.
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
For systems, the analogue of a face-lift is to add to the control graph an edge that creates a cycle, not just an additional node.
Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.
Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
If a program manipulates a large amount of data, it does so in a small number of ways.
If two people write exactly the same program, each should be put into microcode and then they certainly won't be the same.
If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?
If you can imagine a society in which the computer- robot is the only menial, you can imagine anything.
If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.
If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
In a 5 year period we get one superb programming language. Only we can't control when the 5 year period will be.
In computing, invariants are ephemeral.
In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".
In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general -- and often we know it too quickly.
In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way.
In software systems, it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
In the long run every program becomes rococo - then rubble.
Interfaces keep things tidy, but don't accelerate growth: Functions do.
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
It is not a language's weakness but its strengths that control the gradient of its change: Alas, a language never escapes its embryonic sac.
It is not the computer's fault that Maxwell's equations are not adequate to design the electric motor.
It is the user who should parameterize procedures, not their creators.
It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on.
Like punning, programming is a play on words.
Make no mistake about it: Computers process numbers - not symbols. We measure our understanding (and control) by the extent to which we can arithmetize an activity.
Making something variable is easy. Controlling duration of constancy is the trick.
Most people find the concept of programming obvious, but the doing impossible.
Motto for a research laboratory: What we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
Often it is the means that justify the ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
One does not learn computing by using a hand calculator, but one can forget arithmetic.
One man's constant is another man's variable.
Optimization hinders evolution.
Over the centuries the Indians developed sign language for communicating phenomena of interest. Programmers from different tribes (FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL, SNOBOL, etc.) could use one that doesn't require them to carry a blackboard on their ponies.
Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on, as adults we'd be able to read them.
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Programming is an unnatural act.
Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa.
Purely applicative languages are poorly applicable.
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
So many good ideas are never heard from again once they embark in a voyage on the semantic gulf.
Software is under a constant tension. Being symbolic it is arbitrarily perfectible; but also it is arbitrarily changeable.
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
Sometimes I think the only universal in the computing field is the fetch-execute cycle.
Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded middle.
Symmetry is a complexity-reducing concept (co-routines include subroutines); seek it everywhere.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Systems have sub-systems and sub-systems have sub- systems and so on ad infinitum - which is why we're always starting over.
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
The computer is the ultimate polluter: its feces are indistinguish- able from the food it produces.
The computer reminds one of Lon Chaney -- it is the machine of a thousand faces.
The cybernetic exchange between man, computer and algorithm is like a game of musical chairs: The frantic search for balance always leaves one of the three standing ill at ease.
The debate rages on: is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?
The eleventh commandment was "Thou Shalt Compute" or "Thou Shalt Not Compute" - I forget which.
The goal of computation is the emulation of our synthetic abilities, not the understanding of our analytic ones.
The most important computer is the one that rages in our skulls and ever seeks that satisfactory external emulator. The standarization of real computers would be a disaster - and so it probably won't happen.
The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology will arise from the study of software.
The proof of a system's value is its existence.
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.
The use of a program to prove the 4-color theorem will not change mathematics - it merely demonstrates that the theorem, a challenge for a century, is probably not important to mathematics.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.
Think of all the psychic energy expended in seeking a fundamental distinction between "algorithm" and "program".
Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACS in 1 sq. cm.
Though the Chinese should adore APL, it's FORTRAN they put their money on.
To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.
We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
We have the mini and the micro computer. In what semantic niche would the pico computer fall?
We kid ourselves if we think that the ratio of procedure to data in an active data-base system can be made arbitrarily small or even kept small.
We will never run out of things to program as long as there is a single program around.
What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton hotel on its peak.
When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before -- except our fingertips will have been singed.
When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that we do and they don't.
Whenever two programmers meet to criticize their programs, both are silent.
Wherever there is modularity there is the potential for misunderstanding: Hiding information implies a need to check communication.
Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is Latin for office automation?
Within a computer natural language is unnatural.
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
You can't communicate complexity, only an awareness of it.
You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
Source: ACM's SIGPLAN publication, (September, 1982), Article "Epigrams in Programming", by Alan J. Perlis of Yale University.
