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Optimization hinders evolution.

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
Hinders
Hinder
Programming
Evolution
Learning
Optimization

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It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
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Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
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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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Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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Any noun can be verbed.
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You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
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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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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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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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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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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.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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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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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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