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

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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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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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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write 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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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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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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