Science Quote by Alan Perlis

Perlis nails a paradox every programmer learns the hard way: the computer will do exactly what you tell it, but almost never what you meant. The “obvious” in computing is usually obvious only to humans - an intention, a pattern, a rule of thumb. Turning that into something “useful” demands a translation into rigid, literal steps. That translation is where the frustration lives: not in complexity for its own sake, but in the humiliating gap between conceptual clarity and formal precision.

The line works because it refuses the heroic myth of engineering as pure problem-solving. It frames software work as an encounter with stubborn reality: edge cases, ambiguous requirements, leaky abstractions, and systems that behave like perfect lawyers. Your idea may be simple; the world it must survive in isn’t. “Useful” is the trapdoor word here. Useful means correct under pressure: with messy inputs, conflicting constraints, performance limits, and users who will click the one thing you didn’t anticipate.

Perlis, a key voice in early computer science, was writing in a period when programming was shedding its novelty and becoming a discipline. His aphorism reads like a warning against technocratic optimism. Computers aren’t magical brain-extenders; they’re unforgiving machines that force you to operationalize your assumptions. The subtext is almost moral: if you feel frustrated, it’s because the machine is exposing the parts of your thinking you hand-waved as “obvious.” In that sense, frustration isn’t a bug of computing - it’s the job description.