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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

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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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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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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Optimization hinders evolution.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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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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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
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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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Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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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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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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