Science Quote by Alan Perlis

English is a language that treats category as a suggestion, not a prison. “Google” becomes a verb overnight; “adult” gets pressed into service as an action (“I can’t adult today”). Perlis is admiring that opportunistic flexibility, then twisting the knife: our programming languages, built by and for people, often refuse the very kind of improvisation that makes human communication powerful.

The line works because it’s half linguistics, half quiet complaint about software culture. “Every word can be verbed” is playful, but it’s also a model of how humans prototype meaning: you take an existing token, repurpose it, and the community decides if it sticks. Perlis is implicitly arguing that programming languages should enable the same low-friction reuse: abstractions that can be recontextualized without ceremony, APIs that feel less like paperwork, type systems that help without acting like hall monitors.

There’s also a warning buried in the wish. English’s promiscuous verbing is productive, but it’s messy; you rely on shared context, and you tolerate ambiguity until it becomes clarity through use. Programming languages can’t fully afford that. Compilers don’t “get the vibe.” So Perlis is pointing at a tension at the heart of language design: how to make code expressive and generative while keeping it precise enough to be executed, optimized, and maintained by strangers.

Coming from Perlis - a pioneer who helped shape early high-level languages - it reads like a wry push against rigidity and dogma. Let programmers coin actions as naturally as they coin ideas, he’s saying, and the language will feel less like a machine’s interface and more like a medium for thought.