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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
Evolution
Except
Optimization
Built
Hinders
Doe
Precede
Firsts
Hinder
Everything
Follows
First
Complexity
Time
Simplicity
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In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
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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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When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.
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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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Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.
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If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
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In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
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If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
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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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It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
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In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
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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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A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
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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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We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
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A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
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A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
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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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