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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

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
Computer
Science
Embarrassed

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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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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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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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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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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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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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One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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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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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
Alan Perlis