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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

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
English
Word
Language
Every
Would
Languages
Programming

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Alan Perlis
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
Alan Perlis
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Alan Perlis
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Alan Perlis
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
Alan Perlis
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Optimization hinders evolution.
Alan Perlis
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
Alan Perlis
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
Alan Perlis
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
Alan Perlis