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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
Means
Hardware
Mean
Programs
Like
Behave
Machines
Fit
Program
Usually
Ones
Adapting

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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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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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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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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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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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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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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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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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