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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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
Else
Trivial
Everything
Follows
Way
French
Horse
Humor
Learning
Word
Funny
More quotes by Alan Perlis
Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
Alan Perlis
Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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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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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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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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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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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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