If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
ALAN PERLISIn English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.
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Is it possible that software is not like anything else.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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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 English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.
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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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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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Optimization hinders evolution.
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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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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.
ALAN PERLIS