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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
Would
Languages
Programming
English
Word
Language
Every

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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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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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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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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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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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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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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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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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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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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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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