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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
Ends
Programming
Every
Pass
Toward
Reader
Fun
Constipation
Philosophy
Periodically
Asks
Bittersweet
Often
Lest
More quotes by Alan Perlis
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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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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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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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can'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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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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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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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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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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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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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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