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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

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
Must
Programming
Machine
Machines
Program
Learning
Understand
Become

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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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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?
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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