In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
ALAN PERLISIf a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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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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We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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Is it possible that software is not like anything else.
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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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That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
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In English every word can be verbed.
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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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Banality soothes our nerves.
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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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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
ALAN PERLIS