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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.

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
Help
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Learn
Inevitable
Helping
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Live
Program
Matter
Computer
Training
Substantially
Think
Learning
Poorly
Thinking
Technology
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People

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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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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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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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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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