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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
Alan Perlis
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Alan Perlis
Age: 67 †
Born: 1922
Born: April 1
Died: 1990
Died: February 7
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
University Teacher
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Alan Jay Perlis
Alan J. Perlis
Genius
Geniuses
Suffering
Fools
Ignore
Complexity
Remove
Suffer
Avoid
Fool
Pragmatists
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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One man's constant is another man's variable.
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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
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It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
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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 LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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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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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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Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
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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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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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