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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.

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
Alice
Programming
Anything
Best
Book
Layman
Wonderland

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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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.
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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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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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Optimization hinders evolution.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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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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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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