In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
ALAN PERLISLearning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.
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Banality soothes our nerves.
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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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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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There is no such thing as a free variable.
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Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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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 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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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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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.
ALAN PERLIS






