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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.

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
Picture
Swag
Worth
Swagger
Words
Adequately
Described
Sets
Describe
Hardly
Pictures

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
Alan Perlis
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
Alan Perlis
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
Alan Perlis
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
Alan Perlis
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Optimization hinders evolution.
Alan Perlis
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Any noun can be verbed.
Alan Perlis
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
Alan Perlis
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Alan Perlis
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
Alan Perlis
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
Alan Perlis
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Alan Perlis
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Alan Perlis
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
Alan Perlis
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
Alan Perlis
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Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
Alan Perlis
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
Alan Perlis
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
Alan Perlis
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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?
Alan Perlis
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
Alan Perlis
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In English every word can be verbed.
Alan Perlis