One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
ALAN PERLISIn computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
More Alan Perlis Quotes
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Banality soothes our nerves.
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Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
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One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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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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To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.
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A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.
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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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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
ALAN PERLIS






