Any noun can be verbed.
ALAN PERLISIn programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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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 programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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Are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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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.
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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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Every reader should ask himself periodically.
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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 English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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One can only display complex information in the mind.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
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A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
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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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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
ALAN PERLIS