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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.

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
Becomes
Running
Every
Long
Rococo
Rubble
Humorous
Program

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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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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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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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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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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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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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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.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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