I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.
ALAN PERLISOne can only display complex information in the mind.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Banality soothes our nerves.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.
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Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously.
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I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house.
ALAN PERLIS






