There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
ALAN PERLISDon’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.
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Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
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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.
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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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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
ALAN PERLIS






