Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn’t.
ALAN PERLISSome programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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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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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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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One can only display complex information in the mind.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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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.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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