Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
ALAN PERLISFORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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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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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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Dealing with failure is easy.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
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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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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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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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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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You think you KNOW when you learn.
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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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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.
ALAN PERLIS