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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.

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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Alterations
Movement
Static
Views
Display
Information
Complexes
Seeing
Complex
Matter
Lovely
Important
Picture
Mind
Flow
Alteration

More quotes by Alan Perlis

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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Alan Perlis
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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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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 language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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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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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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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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The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
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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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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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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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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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Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs only the third one works.
Alan Perlis
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
Alan Perlis
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
Alan Perlis