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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.

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
Listeners
Explaining
Wake
Program
Head
Nods
Listener

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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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