“11: If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.”

— Alan Perlis , Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "11: If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some." by Alan Perlis?

Alan Perlis photo

Alan Perlis 30

American computer scientist 1922–1990

Related quotes

“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

“It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.”

Nathaniel Borenstein (1957) American computer scientist

Footnote in a paper about computational email.
Computational Mail as Network Infrastructure for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work http://www.guppylake.com/~nsb/CSCW-ATOMICMAIL.txt
Collected quotes about computer languages http://www.sysprog.net/quotlang.html
Attributed

“If you can’t reduce a difficult engineering problem to just one 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper, you will probably never understand it.”

Ralph Brazelton Peck (1912–2008) American civil engineer

as quoted by [John Dunnicliff and Nancy Peck Young, Ralph B. Peck, Educator and Engineer - The Essence of the Man, BiTech Publishers Ltd, Vancouver, 2007, 0-921095-63-5, 114]

“Calvin: As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.
p25”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes

“Prediction of the future is possible only in systems that have stable parameters like celestial mechanics. The only reason why prediction is so successful in celestial mechanics is that the evolution of the solar system has ground to a halt in what is essentially a dynamic equilibrium with stable parameters. Evolutionary systems, however, by their very nature have unstable parameters. They are disequilibrium systems and in such systems our power of prediction, though not zero, is very limited because of the unpredictability of the parameters themselves. If, of course, it were possible to predict the change in the parameters, then there would be other parameters which were unchanged, but the search for ultimately stable parameters in evolutionary systems is futile, for they probably do not exist… Social systems have Heisenberg principles all over the place, for we cannot predict the future without changing it.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Evolutionary Economics, 1981, p. 44

“Some things you don't need until they leave you, they're the things that you miss”

Rob Thomas (1972) American singer

"Bright Lights" (from the Matchbox Twenty album More Than You Think You Are)

“The paper develops a new theory for the analysis of games with incomplete information where the players are uncertain about some important parameters of the game situation, such as the payoff functions, the strategies available to various players, the information other players have about the game, etc. However, each player has a subjective probability distribution over the alternative possibilities.
In most of the paper it is assumed that these probability distributions entertained by the different players are mutually "consistent," in the sense that they can be regarded as conditional probability distributions derived from a certain "basic probability distribution" over the parameters unknown to the various players. But later the theory is extended also to cases where the different players' subjective probability distributions fail to satisfy this consistency assumption.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information Played by “Bayesian” Players," 1967, p. 159 : Abstract

“I miss us, too. I always have, and probably always will”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Source: Love the One You're With

“It's probably a bad indicator of your lifestyle when you miss your ex-boyfriend because he's absolutely lethal.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead to the World

Source: Dead to the World

“You know what my philosophy of life is? That it’s important to have some laughs, but you got to suffer a little too, because otherwise you miss the whole point to life.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Related topics