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Alan Perlis Inspirational Quotes (56)

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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
Alan Perlis
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Alan Perlis
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
Alan Perlis
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
Alan Perlis
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Alan Perlis
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In English every word can be verbed.
Alan Perlis
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Alan Perlis
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
Alan Perlis
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
Alan Perlis
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
Alan Perlis
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
Alan Perlis
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
Alan Perlis
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
Alan Perlis
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
Alan Perlis
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Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
Alan Perlis
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Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
Alan Perlis
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
Alan Perlis
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A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
Alan Perlis
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
Alan Perlis
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Optimization hinders evolution.
Alan Perlis
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
Alan Perlis
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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
Alan Perlis
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
Alan Perlis
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
Alan Perlis
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