" Epigrams on Programming" is an article by

Alan Perlis Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990) 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 was t ...

published in 1982, for ACM's

SIGPLAN SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages. Conferences * Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) * Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) * International Symposium on ...

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 A Turing tarpit (or Turing tar-pit) is any programming language or computer interface that allows for flexibility in function but is difficult to learn and use because it offers little or no support for common tasks. The phrase was coined in 1982 ...

", which he defined as a programming language where "everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."

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List of quotes (Yale)

Magazine articles Association for Computing Machinery {{compu-sci-stub