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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
Sets
Describe
Hardly
Pictures
Picture
Swag
Worth
Swagger
Words
Adequately
Described

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.
Alan Perlis
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
Alan Perlis
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
Alan Perlis
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Alan Perlis
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
Alan Perlis
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
Alan Perlis
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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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 man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
Alan Perlis
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
Alan Perlis
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
Alan Perlis