It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
ALAN PERLISThe best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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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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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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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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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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In English every word can be verbed.
ALAN PERLIS