FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
ALAN PERLISTo understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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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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“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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One can only display complex information in the mind.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.
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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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We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.
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Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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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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