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.
ALAN PERLISFools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.
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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
ALAN PERLIS