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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
Noun
Nouns
Programming
Learning

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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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.
Alan Perlis
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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Alan Perlis
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
Alan Perlis
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
Alan Perlis
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Optimization hinders evolution.
Alan Perlis
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
Alan Perlis
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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?
Alan Perlis
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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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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Alan Perlis
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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
Alan Perlis
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
Alan Perlis
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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?
Alan Perlis
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
Alan Perlis
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Alan Perlis
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
Alan Perlis
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
Alan Perlis
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
Alan Perlis
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
Alan Perlis