Science Quote by Alan Perlis

A “good idea” is usually treated like a moral credit: you had it, you’re smart, end of story. Perlis flips that vanity into a liability. In a single sentence, he turns creativity into a contract. The line is aimed at the comfortable class of innovators who love the dopamine of insight but recoil at the messy obligations that follow: implementation, consequences, maintenance, and apology when things break.

Coming from Alan Perlis, a foundational figure in computer science and programming language design, the warning lands as a critique of tech culture before “move fast and break things” had a slogan. In software, ideas don’t stay hypothetical for long. They get shipped. They scale. They become defaults. A clever abstraction can harden into an institution, and an elegant optimization can become someone else’s midnight pager alert. “Responsible” here isn’t just ethical; it’s operational: you own the edge cases, the incentives you accidentally create, the downstream users you’ll never meet.

The subtext is also about power. The people most able to generate “good ideas” are often insulated from their effects. Perlis is calling out that asymmetry: if you get the prestige of authorship, you inherit the burden of stewardship. It’s a rejection of the romantic myth of the detached genius. In Perlis’s world, intelligence isn’t proven by inventing; it’s proven by staying with what you invent when it stops being elegant and starts being real.