Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
ALAN PERLISIn English every word can be verbed.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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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 programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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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.
ALAN PERLIS