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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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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
Fun
Constipation
Philosophy
Periodically
Asks
Bittersweet
Often
Lest
Ends
Programming
Every
Pass
Toward
Reader
More quotes by Alan Perlis
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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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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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Alan Perlis
In English every word can be verbed.
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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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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.
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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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