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One man's constant is another man's variable.

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
Programmers
Constant
Another
Men
Variable
Variables

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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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Any noun can be verbed.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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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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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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