Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
ALAN PERLISWe toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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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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What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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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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If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house.
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That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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In English every word can be verbed.
ALAN PERLIS