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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
Learning
Knowing
Language
Doesn
Way
Affect
Think
Programming
Thinking
Program
Worth

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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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Any noun 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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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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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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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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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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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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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