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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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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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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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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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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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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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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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