
Epigrams in Programming (1982) - bookofjoe
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
======
NoodleIncident
> 63\. When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that we do and they
> don't.

This was what turned me off of machine learning some 30 years after this was
written. Deep learning is amazing, but it still seems to be the people
tweaking the experimental setup who are doing the real learning.

------
tictoc
> 19\. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is
> not worth knowing.

Can someone give an example of this for someone who has programmed primarily
in java, python, and javascript? What would be one worth learning?

~~~
anon1253
Knowing some C/C++ is very useful if you want to get a better understanding of
what the computer is doing. Or Assembly of course, but that gets complicated
fast.

Common Lisp / Clojure / Scheme (or any language from that family) will really
let you appreciate some fundamental functional programming tricks once you
finally "grok" them.

Prolog, it's great. You'll never look at graphs, trees, search or first order
logic the same way. And, maybe, some day you'll be the one that says "that's
just two lines of prolog".

Haskell, or any other very strongly statically typed language. I'm definitely
partial to dynamically typed languages, but you gotta try it before you knock
it :-)

Also if you have some money to spend, try Mathematica. It's one of those
things that keeps getting reinvented, but poorly. Shamefully it's not open.

~~~
abc_lisper
Mathematica is not open, but the engine is free(as in beer) now

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univacky
Seems almost hard to find that copy instead of this one:

[https://cpsc.yale.edu/epigrams-programming](https://cpsc.yale.edu/epigrams-
programming)

------
dang
Discussed recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434630)

