Alan Perlis Quotes

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.

Sometimes you surprise yourself with what you do under pressure.

He looks like a greyhound, but he runs like a bus.

In EVERY situation and EVERY circumstance of your life, God is always doing a thousand different things that you cannot see and you do not know.

I suddenly leaned forward,bringing my face close to hers.catching her breath,stifling that laugh and pink tongue,she watched me wide-eyed.I removed the wallet from my back pocket and sat down casually again. "What happened?" I asked idly. "I thought...never mind".She blinked. Ha,gotcha

I think probably the best example was the year Jack Palance dropped down and gave us push-ups when he accepted his award for supporting actor. Then we got to throw away a lot of the script because we just did Jack Palance jokes, because it was just too delicious, watching this old man carry on like that.

What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected.

I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives.

He leaned closer to me and then seemed shocked as he realized what he was doing. "Why would you do that? Why would you do that for me?

Did you hear that! Yuki, the heartless Yuki! Heartless Yuki has begged me with tears to let him visit my shop!

Jake leaned on the horn, swearing loudly. Gina covered her eyes. Doc flung his arms around me, burying his face in my lap, and Dopey, to my great surprise, began to scream like a girl, very close to my ear.

Rodney set a plate in front of me and one in front of my mother. I almost fainted when she began to eat instead of hurling it at him. Had one of the vampires gotten tired of her bitching and bitten her into a better mood? She caught my flabbergasted look. "I watched what he put in it" she said defensively. Rodney, instead of being insulted, just laughed. "You're welcome, Justina.

First I went left, he did too. Then I went right, and he did too. Then I went left again, and he went to buy a hot dog.

[About Paz De La Huerta....] And there is this girl in the audience and she's gorgeous I can only kind of see her silhouette and she's getting like her t*ts out and I'm like: God, that's unusual.

He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid.

Good visual layout shows the logical structure of a program.

So much grief, so much anger. So unlike the usual Adrian.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Having no other recourse, Roran resorted to the unexpected: he stuck his head and neck out and shouted, "BAH!" just as he would if he were trying to scare someone in a dark hallway.

Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is

Which is weird. But not the craziest thing I can think of Rose doing.ʺ I appreciated the support.