Science Quote by Alan Perlis

Perlis takes a folksy proverb and flips it into a geek’s koan: sure, an image can replace a lot of description, but description isn’t the same thing as understanding. The first clause grants the popular comfort of “a picture is worth 10K words,” then tightens the screws with a qualifier that feels almost legalistic: “only those to describe the picture.” He’s pointing at a category error we make constantly, mistaking depiction for explanation. A photo can show you a circuit board; it can’t, on its own, tell you why the design fails under load or what tradeoffs shaped it.

The second sentence is the real jab: “Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.” Perlis isn’t defending prose as a higher art; he’s defending abstraction. Most interesting “10K words” aren’t about surfaces. They’re about relationships, causality, intent, and edge cases: the very stuff computation and scientific thinking try to formalize. In programming, this is practically a manifesto against diagram worship. Flowcharts and UI mockups can document what’s there, but they struggle to capture behavior, invariants, and the hidden assumptions where bugs breed.

Context matters: Perlis helped shape early computer science education, a field forever tempted by visual metaphors (“pipes,” “stacks,” “trees”) that illuminate and mislead in the same move. His quip warns that images are powerful precisely because they feel immediate; the subtext is that immediacy can become intellectual laziness. The hard work is translating between representations, not choosing the prettiest one.