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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.

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
Even
Program
Think
Learning
Thinking
Teach
Sure
Learn
Write
Certain
Writing
Programming

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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