You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
ALAN PERLISIn software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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Banality soothes our nerves.
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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
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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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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
ALAN PERLIS