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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

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
Systems
Bird
Early
Technology
Often
Makes
Worm
Worms
Software

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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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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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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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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.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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