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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.

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
Always
Nerves
Desperate
Humorous
Soothes
Field
Cliches
Fields
Banality
Technology
Computing
Need
Cliche
Needs
Vitality

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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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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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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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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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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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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Any noun can be verbed.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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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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The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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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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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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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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