In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
ALAN PERLISIf you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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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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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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One can only display complex information in the mind.
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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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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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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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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Are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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