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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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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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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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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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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 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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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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 good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
Alan Perlis