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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
Thinking
Program
Worth
Learning
Knowing
Language
Doesn
Way
Affect
Think
Programming

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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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 programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
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