In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
ALAN PERLISIn the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
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“Toward what end, toward what end?”-but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
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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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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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Any noun can be verbed.
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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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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
ALAN PERLIS