Alan Perlis - Languages Quotes

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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

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

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
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

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

Alan Perlis
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

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

Alan Perlis