Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
ALAN PERLISIf a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
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Banality soothes our nerves.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
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Every reader should ask himself periodically.
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You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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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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I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.
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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
ALAN PERLIS