Quote

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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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
Making
Thoughts
Grain
Self
Goes
Programming
Children
Fun
Details
Learning
Critical
Modern
Program
Devoting
Education
Discipline
Acquiring
Teach
Students
Organizing
Attention
Plans
Detail

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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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Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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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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