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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

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
Pragmatists
Precede
Follows
Programming
Complexity
Simplicity
Doe

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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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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 LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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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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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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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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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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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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