Epigrams on Programming

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"Epigrams on Programming" is an article by Alan Perlis published in 1982, for ACM's SIGPLAN journal. The epigrams are a series of short, programming-language-neutral, humorous statements about computers and programming, which are widely quoted.

It first appeared in SIGPLAN Notices 17(9), September 1982.

In epigram #54, Perlis coined the term "Turing tarpit", which he defined as a programming language where "everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."

• Perlis, A. J. (September 1982). "Epigrams on programming". ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 17 (9). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 7–13. doi:10.1145/947955.1083808. Archived from the original on January 17, 1999.

• List of quotes (Yale University)
• Full article text -- (including so-called "meta epigrams", numbers 122-130)

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