David John Wheeler, né le 9 février 1927 à Birmingham et mort le 13 décembre 2004 à Cambridge, est un informaticien britannique qui contribue à l'élaboration du EDSAC, du langage assembleur et de la transformée de Burrows-Wheeler.
Il est le titulaire du premier doctorat de l'histoire de l'informatique.
Wikipedia
“Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.”
Trust, Complexity and Control: Confidence in a Convergent World, Cofta, Piotr, 2007-09-27, John Wiley & Sons, 9780470517840, en https://books.google.com/books?id=xRLqGKY8axwC&q=compatibility+is+deliberately+repeating+the+mistakes+of+others&pg=PA73,
“Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection.”
Attributed to David Wheeler by Butler Lampson in his Turing Lecture https://web.archive.org/web/20070221210039/http://research.microsoft.com/Lampson/Slides/TuringLecture.doc (17 February 1993)
Lampson uses the phrase without attribution in Authentication in distributed systems: theory and practice https://doi.org/10.1145/138873.138874 (November 1992)
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