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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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
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Behave
Machines
Fit
Program
Usually
Ones
Adapting
Means
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Programs
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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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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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 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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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Any noun 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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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 a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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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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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
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