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

Alan Perlis

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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
Cases
Completeness
Programmers
Ingenuity
Measured
Analysis
Logic
Case

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
Alan Perlis
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
Alan Perlis
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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
Alan Perlis
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
Alan Perlis
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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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.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
Alan Perlis
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
Alan Perlis
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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
Alan Perlis
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
Alan Perlis
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
Alan Perlis
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Alan Perlis
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Alan Perlis
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
Alan Perlis
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Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
Alan Perlis
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
Alan Perlis
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
Alan Perlis
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
Alan Perlis
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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
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
Alan Perlis