120 aphorisms on programming, written in 1982 and with many of them still surprisingly valid, some of which are:
- A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
- Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
- It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
- Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?
- When someone says “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done,” give him a lollipop.
- In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.
- The proof of a system’s value is its existence.
- You can’t communicate complexity, only an awareness of it.
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