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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
Programming
Sugar
Cancer
Causes
Syntactic
Semicolon
Lisp

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Any noun can be verbed.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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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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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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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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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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