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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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
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More quotes by Alan Perlis
One man's constant is another man's variable.
Alan Perlis
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.
Alan Perlis
In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
Alan Perlis
We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Alan Perlis
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
Alan Perlis
Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
Alan Perlis
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Alan Perlis
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
Alan Perlis
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?
Alan Perlis
To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
Alan Perlis
There is no such thing as a free variable.
Alan Perlis
In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
Alan Perlis
Any noun can be verbed.
Alan Perlis
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
Alan Perlis
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
Alan Perlis
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
Alan Perlis
Optimization hinders evolution.
Alan Perlis
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
Alan Perlis
A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
Alan Perlis
Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
Alan Perlis
