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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

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
Way
Affect
Think
Programming
Thinking
Program
Worth
Learning
Knowing
Language
Doesn

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Any noun can be verbed.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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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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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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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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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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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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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