Science Quote by Alan Perlis

Perlis draws a clean, brutal hierarchy around a single modern affliction: complexity as the tax we pay for ambition. The line reads like a proverb, but it’s really a critique of how technical cultures rationalize mess. Each sentence is a rung on a ladder, moving from denial to endurance to strategy to mastery. The punch is in the verbs. “Ignore” implies not innocence but negligence; “suffer” frames pragmatism as an ethic of coping, the competent person’s slow burn in systems that won’t simplify themselves. “Avoid” is the quiet admission that complexity can sometimes be routed around with taste, constraints, or refusal.

Then Perlis drops the gauntlet: “Geniuses remove it.” Not manage, not document, not abstract-away-until-next-quarter - remove. It’s a standard that sounds elitist until you place it in his world: computer science in the mid-to-late 20th century, when software was becoming the nervous system of institutions, and accidental complexity (layers of workaround, legacy, and feature creep) was starting to look like destiny. Perlis, famous for epigrams and for pushing structured thinking in programming, is defending an older, harder craft ideal: clarity as an act of design, not a byproduct of tooling.

The subtext is a rebuke to cultures that romanticize “hard” as “deep.” Complexity often masquerades as sophistication, shielding bad assumptions and mediocre architecture. Perlis insists the real flex is subtraction - the rare talent to see what can be made unnecessary, and to have the nerve to make it so.