Sunday, August 24, 2008

Perlis' epigrams

Alan J. Perlis was the first Turing award winner, "for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction". He is also famous for his article Epigrams on Programming, which contains 130 one-liners, mostly about his experience with programming. A few of the epigrams are on epigrams... he calls them meta-epigrams (Russell's paradox?)!
Five pearls I found from the article (go dig your own):
  • A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
  • There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.
  • The computer is the ultimate polluter. Its feces are indistinguishable from the food it produces.
  • Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
  • The last epigram? Neither eat nor drink them, snuff epigrams.

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