Skip to main content

Perlisisms


  • A picture is worth 10,000 words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10,000 words can be adequately described with pictures
  • Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits.
  • Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
  • In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
  • Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
  • The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
  • If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.
  • Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn't.
  • Wherever there is modularity there is the potential for misunderstanding: Hiding information implies a need to check communication.
  • To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program
  • 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.
  • Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
  • Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
  • The goal of computation is the emulation of our synthetic abilities, not the understanding of our analytic ones.
  • Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
  • In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".
  • Computation has made the tree flower.
  • One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
  • Within a computer natural language is unnatural.

Comments