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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

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
Enough
Believe
Artificial
Years
Spent
Make
Intelligence
Computer
Technology
Year
Science

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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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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You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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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.
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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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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
Alan Perlis