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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

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
Program
Understand
Write
Else
Someone
Writing

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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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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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Any noun can be verbed.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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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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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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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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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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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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