1963, Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the Trade Mart in Dallas
“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.”
The Synthesis of Algorithmic Systems, 1966
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Alan Perlis 30
American computer scientist 1922–1990Related quotes
How I do my computing (2006) http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
2000s
Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)
“The Socialists ask what is our program? Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists.”
Article in Popolo d'Italia, quoted in "A History of Terrorism" (2001) by Walter Laqueur, p. 71
Undated
“The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language.”
"You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one." (August 2013) https://gnunet.org/internetistschuld (around 02:16)
2010s
Context: Programming is programming. If you get good at programming, it doesn't matter which language you learned it in, because you'll be able to do programming in any language. The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language. And if you have a talent for that, and you learned it here, you can take it over there. Oh, one thing: if you want to get a picture of a programming at its most powerful, you should learn Lisp or Scheme because they are more elegant and powerful than other languages.
“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”