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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

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
Syntactic
Semicolon
Lisp
Programming
Sugar
Cancer
Causes

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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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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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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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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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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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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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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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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.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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