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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Alan Perlis

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Alan Perlis
Age: 67 †
Born: 1922
Born: April 1
Died: 1990
Died: February 7
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
University Teacher
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Alan Jay Perlis
Alan J. Perlis
Avoid
Fool
Pragmatists
Genius
Geniuses
Suffering
Fools
Ignore
Complexity
Remove
Suffer

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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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When someone says, I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done, give him a lollipop.
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Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
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