Science & Tech Quote by Alan Perlis

Perlis flips the self-help piety of "the early bird gets the worm" into a deadpan warning: in software, moving first often means you become the thing that gets eaten. The joke lands because it’s not just wordplay; it captures an industry reflex that still feels painfully current. Shipping early is celebrated as virtue, but complex systems punish premature certainty. The first implementation tends to harden into the architecture, and architecture is where tomorrow’s regrets go to live.

The subtext is about path dependence. Early decisions in software don’t merely solve a problem; they create the vocabulary, interfaces, and assumptions that everyone else must now accommodate. Once code is deployed, it becomes precedent. It attracts dependencies, workarounds, and "just one more patch" until the original choice is no longer a choice but a constraint. The early bird isn’t industrious; it’s unlucky enough to be canonical.

Perlis, writing from the era when computing was professionalizing and systems were ballooning in scale, is also taking a swipe at managerial impatience. "Get it done fast" sounds like efficiency, but it often means forcing an immature design into production reality, where users and edge cases act like predators. The aphorism carries the familiar Perlis cynicism: progress narratives are comforting, but in software the cost of being first is frequently paid in maintenance, technical debt, and the slow humiliation of watching your "temporary" solution become infrastructure.