That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
ALAN PERLISYou can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.
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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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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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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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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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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
ALAN PERLIS