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A picture is worth 10,000 words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10,000 words can be adequately described with pictures
- Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits.
- Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
- In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
- Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
- 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.
- If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.
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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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Wherever there is modularity there is the potential for misunderstanding: Hiding information implies a need to check communication.
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To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program
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One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.
- Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
- Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
- The goal of computation is the emulation of our synthetic abilities, not the understanding of our analytic ones.
- Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
- In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".
- Computation has made the tree flower.
- One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
- Within a computer natural language is unnatural.
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