Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
ALAN PERLISIf a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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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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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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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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Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
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A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
ALAN PERLIS