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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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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
Measured
Analysis
Logic
Case
Cases
Completeness
Programmers
Ingenuity

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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When someone says, I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done, give him a lollipop.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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