I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.
ALAN PERLISIt is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Is it possible that software is not like anything else.
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Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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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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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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“Toward what end, toward what end?”-but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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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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Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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