You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
ALAN PERLISA year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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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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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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Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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The 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.
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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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If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
ALAN PERLIS