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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
Aren
Willing
Ideas
Good
Computing
Responsible

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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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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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