Quote

Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

Alan Perlis

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Perlis
Age: 67 †
Born: 1922
Born: April 1
Died: 1990
Died: February 7
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
University Teacher
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Alan Jay Perlis
Alan J. Perlis
Willing
Ideas
Good
Computing
Responsible
Aren

More quotes by Alan Perlis

Image
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Alan Perlis
Image
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
Alan Perlis
Image
In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Alan Perlis
Image
We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
Alan Perlis
Image
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.
Alan Perlis
Image
One man's constant is another man's variable.
Alan Perlis
Image
Any noun can be verbed.
Alan Perlis
Image
There is no such thing as a free variable.
Alan Perlis
Image
Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Alan Perlis
Image
In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
Alan Perlis
Image
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
Alan Perlis
Image
Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
Alan Perlis
Image
If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
Alan Perlis
Image
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
Alan Perlis
Image
To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
Alan Perlis
Image
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
Alan Perlis
Image
When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
Alan Perlis
Image
When someone says, I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done, give him a lollipop.
Alan Perlis
Image
Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
Alan Perlis
Image
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
Alan Perlis