Epigrams from Alan Perlis

Today's post was supposed to be a response to the article last night by Jeff Atwood on programming quotations. Evidently I screwed things up by trying to insert it too close to the regular posting time. Since this is an off-topic post, I'll just run it late rather than waiting for tomorrow.

Jeff Atwood put up an article last night about quotes and influencers in the field of computer science. It's mostly a modern (last 15 years) collection so I thought I'd point to the original quote machine, Alan Perlis. Perlis was an early researcher in the field of computing with the US Army and received the first ACM Turing Award in 1966. In 1982 he published a collection of epigrams about his experiences in computing. Some of them are funny, some of them are serious, but there's almost always something of value you can pull out of each.

For instance, these two make a nice description of a certain battle that has been going on for the last few years:

Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?