Quote

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?

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
Whole
Soap
Always
Bubbles
Like
Software
Meant
Possible
Point
Else
Discarded
Anything
Bubble

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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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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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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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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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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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