Science Quote by Alan Perlis

Perlis lands the punch by redefining "low level" as a tax on human attention. In programmer folklore, low-level languages are praised for being "close to the machine", a phrase that smuggles in virtue: seriousness, power, mastery. Perlis flips the valence. The machine may be the point, but the machine's trivia is not. If your code forces you to babysit details that don't serve the idea you are trying to express, the language isn't empowering you; it's conscripting you into clerical work.

The intent is less a snob's ranking than a cognitive critique. "Irrelevant" is doing heavy lifting. Not irrelevant to execution, but irrelevant to meaning: manual memory management when you're reasoning about algorithms, bookkeeping types when you're designing data flow, pointer gymnastics when you're trying to state a relationship. Perlis, a major voice in early computer science and a champion of abstraction, is arguing that the true cost of a language is measured in the mental stack frames it forces you to keep alive.

The subtext also targets a certain macho aesthetic of programming: suffering as proof of competence. If you're spending your day appeasing the language or the hardware, you're not necessarily closer to truth; you're just closer to constraint. Coming from an era when programmers fought limited memory, primitive tooling, and hardware quirks, the line reads like hard-won impatience. It's a reminder that "close to the metal" can be an engineering requirement, not an identity, and that progress in programming is largely the art of making the important parts harder to ignore than the irrelevant ones.