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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

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
Flower
Grows
Fortran
Every
Blooms
Hardy
Occasionally
Weed
Programming
Computer

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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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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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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
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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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In English every word can be verbed.
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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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