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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

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
Speaks
Japan
English
Computer
Probably
Speak
Made

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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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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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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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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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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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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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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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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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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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