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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
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More quotes by 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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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
Alan Perlis
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
Alan Perlis
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
Alan Perlis
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
Alan Perlis
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
Alan Perlis
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Alan Perlis
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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
Alan Perlis
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
Alan Perlis
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
Alan Perlis
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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.
Alan Perlis
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
Alan Perlis