One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
ALAN PERLISIn computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
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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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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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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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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
ALAN PERLIS