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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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