Quote

Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

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
Purpose
Another
Computing
Two
Purposes
Every
Programming
Program
Wasn
Least
Written

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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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