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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
Willing
Ideas
Good
Computing
Responsible
Aren

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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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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In English every word 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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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