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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.

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
Computing
Shorter
Keeps
Failure
Getting
Mean
Time

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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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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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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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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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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
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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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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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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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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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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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