Science Quote by Alan Perlis

A line like this lands because it sounds like a throwaway joke while smuggling in an indictment. Perlis, a foundational computer scientist with a poet’s ear for how programmers talk, is riffing on the field’s addiction to fresh slogans: “paradigm shift,” “AI revolution,” “move fast,” “best practices,” “cloud-native.” The punch isn’t that cliches exist; it’s that computing continually manufactures them on purpose, as if novelty in language could stand in for clarity in thought.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s affectionate: computing really does reinvent itself at a pace that forces new metaphors, new handles for new abstractions. Languages, architectures, and models appear faster than stable vocabulary can keep up. On the other side, Perlis is warning that the discipline’s progress narrative often runs on rhetoric. Cliches are social tools: they let teams coordinate, investors believe, and departments justify budgets without resolving the hard parts. They’re a kind of compression algorithm for uncertainty.

The subtext is about power. Whoever coins the cliche gets to set the agenda, frame the problem, and declare what counts as “modern.” The phrase “in need” is the sly twist: it suggests a dependency, almost an appetite, not an innocent byproduct. In Perlis’s era - when structured programming, software engineering as a managerial ideal, and “computer science” itself were busy branding their legitimacy - new cliches weren’t just linguistic fluff. They were markers of belonging and weapons in methodological turf wars.

Perlis is reminding us that a field obsessed with precision can be weirdly comfortable with vagueness, as long as it’s fashionable.