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Waterbed Theory—Some complexity is essential and cannot be eliminated. If you push it down in one place, it swells up in another

Feb 2025

Coined by Lary Wall, inventor of Perl (programming language)

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”—Einstein

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  • Build from scratch — [[Waterbed Theory—Some complexity is essential and cannot be eliminated. If you push it down in one place, it swells ...
  • Laws of Programming — [[Waterbed Theory—Some complexity is essential and cannot be eliminated. If you push it down in one place, it swells ...
  • The Lox Language · Crafting Interpreters (archived) — [[Larry Wall]], Perl’s inventor/prophet calls this the “[waterbed theory](http://wiki.c2.com/?WaterbedTheory)”. [[Wat...
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