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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
Think
Programming
Thinking
Program
Worth
Learning
Knowing
Language
Doesn
Way
Affect

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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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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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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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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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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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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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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The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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