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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
Computing
Responsible
Aren
Willing
Ideas
Good

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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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.
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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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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
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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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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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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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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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In English every word can be verbed.
Alan Perlis