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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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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
Good
Computing
Responsible
Aren
Willing
Ideas

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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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.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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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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Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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