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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

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
Programming
Error
Errors
Else
Everything
Reborn
Programmers

More quotes by 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.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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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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The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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