Hah I stumbled on to this...

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

a few highlights...

3. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

15. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.

40. There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

41. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress

On Monday, 24 August 2020 at 00:10:42 UTC, claptrap wrote:
> Hah I stumbled on to this...
>
> https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
>
> a few highlights...
>
> 3. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
>
> 15. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
>
> 40. There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
>
> 41. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress

Epigram zero: "Clever" is not the same as "true" - but they are related.

Also note the Hacker Folklore appendix to the Jargon Files ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/appendixa.html ) - and *wow* is there ever a document that needs new revisions. Surely it can't be that hacker culture hasn't changed over the past twenty years ... right?

That aside, I really wish somebody would feed Perlis' epigrams into GPT-3. I'm curious what it would come up with. (Come on OpenAI, give us commercial API access already.)