Alan Perlis - Program Quotes

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You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

Alan Perlis
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?

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

Alan Perlis
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

Alan Perlis
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

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
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and, learning to be self-critical?

Alan Perlis