Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

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.

If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.

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

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.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".

Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

One man's constant is another man's variable.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

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?

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word 'frustration'.

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.

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

Symmetry is a complexity-reducing concept (co-routines include subroutines); seek it everywhere.

The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity.

The Tax Code today is more complicated than ever, and the very people on the Republican side who denounce the Tax Code's complexity are the ones that put together what they now call a convoluted monstrosity. They put it into effect.

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.

We need to shift the paradigm from reactive technologies to more integrative solutions that deal with the variety and complexity of the threats that are out there today.

What we call 'evil' doesn't necessarily deserve any kind of respect or understanding, by any means; it just deserves an acknowledgement of its complexity so we can better understand it - so we can help prevent it.

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.