Quote

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
Best
Book
Layman
Wonderland
Alice
Programming
Anything

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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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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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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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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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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 language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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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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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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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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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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Any noun can be verbed.
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