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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

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
Good
Thinking
Conceptual
Programming
Learning
Universe
Language

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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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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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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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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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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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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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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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