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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.

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
Symbiosis
Adjust
Machine
Machines
Must
Men

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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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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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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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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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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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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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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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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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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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