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
Every
Programming
Program
Wasn
Least
Written
Purpose
Another
Computing
Two
Purposes

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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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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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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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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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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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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 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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