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A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.
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Every program has (at least) two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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In a 5 year period we get one superb programming language - only we can't control when the 5 year period will begin.
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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.
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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
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LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
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Symmetry is a complexity-reducing concept (co-routines include subroutines); seek it everywhere.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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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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The computing field is always in need of new cliches.
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The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

Biography

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 - February 7, 1990) was a prominent U.S. computer scientist. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the first recipient of the Turing Award, in 1966.

In 1943, he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (known now as Carnegie Mellon University). During World War II he served in the US Army where he became interested in mathematics. At MIT, he earned both a master's degree in mathematics in 1949 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1950.

According to the citation, the Turing Award was for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction. This is a reference to the work he had done as a member of the team that developed the ALGOL programming language

He was the first head of the Computer Science Department of Carnegie-Mellon University.

In 1982, he wrote an article for ACM's SIGPLAN journal, Epigrams In Programming, describing in one-sentence distillations many of the things he had learned about programming over his career. The epigrams have been widely quoted.

...(more on Wikipedia)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alan Perlis".
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