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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
Continuing
Measure
Perspective
Attitude
Fortran
Noting
Programmer
Programmers
Vitality

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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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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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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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