"We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses."
Alan Jay Perlis was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and in 1966 he became the first recipient of the ACM Turing Award.
"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."
"Both knowledge and wisdom extend mans reach. Knowledge led to computers, wisdom to chopsticks."
"There is an appreciated substance to the phrase "ALGOL-like" which is often used in arguments about programming, languages and computation. ALGOL appears to be a durable model, and even flourishes under surgery — be it explorative, plastic, or amputative."
"This language [LISP] induces humorous arguments among programmers, often being damned and praised for the same feature."
"Programmers should never be satisfied with languages which permit them to program everything, but to program nothing of interest easily."
"I think that its extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I dont think we are. I think were responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we dont become missionaries. Dont feel as if youre Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Dont feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. Whats in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more."