If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
ALAN PERLISLearning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Every reader should ask himself periodically.
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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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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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We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.
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One can only display complex information in the mind.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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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.
ALAN PERLIS






