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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
Programming
Computer
Flower
Grows
Fortran
Every
Blooms
Hardy
Occasionally
Weed

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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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