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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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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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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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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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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You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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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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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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Optimization hinders evolution.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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