Quote

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.

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
Problem
Investing
Hard
Math
Work
Handle
Failure
Wrong
Success
Solved
Easy
Dealing
Also
Improve

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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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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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
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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.
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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