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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

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
Noting
Programmer
Programmers
Vitality
Continuing
Measure
Perspective
Attitude
Fortran

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In English every word can be verbed.
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Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
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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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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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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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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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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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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