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There is no such thing as a free variable.

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
Thing
Variable
Variables
Free

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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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 your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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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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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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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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