Science Quote by Alan Perlis

Perlis is smuggling a bleak truth about power into a tidy engineering aphorism: in software, the code often wins. “Easier” isn’t praise here; it’s an indictment of momentum. Once a program exists, it accumulates gravity - deadlines, sunk cost, organizational pride, the fear of reopening decisions that were “already settled.” Against that, a specification is just paper, or at best a shared story. Stories are negotiable. Running systems are not.

The line lands because it flips the idealized hierarchy. In textbooks, the spec is the constitution and the program is its faithful implementation. In real teams, the program becomes the constitution, and the spec gets rewritten as post-hoc justification: what we built must have been what we meant. That’s the subtextual sting. Perlis isn’t describing a neutral tradeoff; he’s warning that “requirements” can become a polite form of denial, updated to preserve the appearance of control.

Context matters: Perlis came out of an era when computing was professionalizing, trying to borrow credibility from older engineering disciplines that prized formal specifications. His quip punctures that aspiration with a cynic’s precision. It also prefigures today’s product culture, where shipping is a moral good and metrics can retroactively sanctify a compromise. The sentence is short, but it sketches a whole sociology: software is malleable, yet organizations are not, so we change the document because it’s safer than changing the artifact.