We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.
ALAN PERLISSyntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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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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Are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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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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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
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One can only display complex information in the mind.
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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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Any noun can be verbed.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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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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