Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
ALAN PERLISEverything should be built top-down, except the first time.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.
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One can only display complex information in the mind.
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That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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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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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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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 software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
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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.
ALAN PERLIS