If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
ALAN PERLISSimplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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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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Any noun can be verbed.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
ALAN PERLIS