Alan Perlis

“Wherever there is a system, there is a risk of it being observed, and this observation may reduce the entropy of the system.”

“One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.”

“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?”

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”

“Optimization hinders evolution.”

“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.”

“In the long run, every program becomes rococo - then rubble.”

“LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.”

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

“A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing.”

“The goal of computation is the emulation of our synthetic universe.”

“If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.”

“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.”

“There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.”

“The cybernetic task is to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.”

“Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.”

“Computer science is the study of procedures.”

“The eleventh commandment was 'Thou Shalt Compute' or 'Thou Shalt Not Compute' - I forget which.”

“To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.”

“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.”