Quote

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
Way
French
Horse
Humor
Learning
Word
Funny
Else
Trivial
Everything
Follows

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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can'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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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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Any noun can be verbed.
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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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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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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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Optimization hinders evolution.
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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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