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

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Alan Perlis
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove 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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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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.
Alan Perlis
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Alan Perlis
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
Alan Perlis
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
Alan Perlis
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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
Alan Perlis
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
Alan Perlis
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
Alan Perlis
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
Alan Perlis
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
Alan Perlis
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
Alan Perlis
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Any noun can be verbed.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Alan Perlis