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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

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
Informal
Proceed
Formal
Means
Mean

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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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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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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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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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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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In English every word can be verbed.
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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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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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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 programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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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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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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