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.
ALAN PERLISWhen 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.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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 computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Is it possible that software is not like anything else.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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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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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
ALAN PERLIS