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

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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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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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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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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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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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Optimization hinders evolution.
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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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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?
Alan Perlis