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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.
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
Except
Optimization
Built
Hinders
Doe
Precede
Firsts
Hinder
Everything
Follows
First
Complexity
Time
Simplicity
Evolution
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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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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We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
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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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In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration.
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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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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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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
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In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
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In English every word can be verbed.
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
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Optimization hinders evolution.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.
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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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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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If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
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