“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 PERLISI think it is inevitable that people program poorly.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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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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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.
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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
ALAN PERLIS