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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.

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
Give
Need
Lollipop
Done
Developers
Giving
Geek
Needs
Programming
Says
Language
Someone

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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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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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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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