Quote

Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

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
Ends
Advance
Mean
Justify
Even
Goals
Technique
Structure
Goal
Crumble
Means
Survives
Often
Structures

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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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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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