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@zen_m4
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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
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Software is a gas. It expands to fill its container.
— Nathan Myhrvold's Law on bloat
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Anything added dilutes everything else.
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If you don't respect inherent complexity, you create accidental complexity.
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Google has found that the most innovative workers — also the “happiest,” by its definition — are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.
— New York Times
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The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be.
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If you believe "pragmatism" and "theory" are in opposition, you understand neither.
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Beginner: "Threads are hard." Intermediate: "Don't fear multithreading." Expert: "Threads are hard."
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Well, I'm an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field.
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This is why you spent all that time learning to program: you can fix things. You can make new and amazing things. Don't take that ability lightly.
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Make it run, then make it right, then make it fast.
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Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
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Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection, but that usually will create another problem.
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The effect of individual differences will far outweigh any effect of the programming language [on productivity].
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Some people, when confronted with a reliability problem, think, “I know, I’ll build a distributed system.” Now they have n² problems.
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The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.
— reply to Dave Winer, about JSON vs. XML
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Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
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The worst features [of a language] are the attractive nuisances, the features that are both useful and dangerous.
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The building metaphor has outlived its usefulness. [...] Let us turn nature and study complexity in living things. [...] The secret is that it is grown, not built.
— No Silver Bullet
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Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.
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When in doubt, use brute force.
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Know your experiments, or your whole project will be an experiment.
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Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
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I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
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...it is almost always incorrect to begin the decomposition of a system into modules on the basis of a flowchart. We propose instead that one begins with a list of difficult design decisions or design decisions which are likely to change. Each module is then designed to hide such a decision from the others
— On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules
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the art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.
— "Notes on structured programming", 1970
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As a matter of fact, the challenges of designing high-quality programs and of designing high-quality proofs are very similar, so similar that I am no longer able to distinguish between the two: I see no meaningful difference between programming methodology and mathematical methodology in general.
— "Why American Computing Science seems incurable", 1995
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As a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.
— "Notes on structured programming", 1970
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It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
— Hofstadter’s Law
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Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
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Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.
— Darwi Odrade, in Dune
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The cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. … The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other.
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Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense.
— "The Mentat Handbook", in Dune
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Don’t underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don’t ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit.
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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.
— Computational Mail as Network Infrastructure for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
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Object/Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
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It also helped that Bjarne was willing to put certain features in the language just to enable some of my idioms. He once refered to it as "just in time language design."
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Mal nommer les choses, c'est ajouter au malheur du monde.
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Programming languages teach you not to want what they cannot provide. You have to think in a language to write programs in it, and it's hard to want something you can't describe.
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I would advise students to pay more attention to the fundamental ideas rather than the latest technology. The technology will be out-of-date before they graduate. Fundamental ideas never get out of date. However, what worries me about what I just said is that some people would think of Turing machines and Goedel's theorem as fundamentals. I think those things are fundamental but they are also nearly irrelevant. I think there are fundamental design principles, for example structured programming principles, the good ideas in "Object Oriented" programming, etc.
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We should, however, give up on perfection. Some code will be slower than we want because we don't have time to optimize it, and some code will be uglier than we want because we have no choice but to optimize it.
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When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
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Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
— Epigram in Programming #58, 1982
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There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
— 1980 Turing Award Lecture
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The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.
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Citations
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Don't take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you.
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Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept
— Postel's Law
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Merely adding features does not make it easier for users to do things, it just makes the manual thicker.
— Program design in the UNIX environment
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You know what architecture is? It is the art of drawing lines.
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We are defined by what we make time to do, not by what we do when we have time.
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The world moves forward on those who are dissidents. Because without dissent there is no creativity.
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First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you're ready to engineer.
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What children do well and adults forget about: constantly testing boundaries.
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When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
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I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
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I remember one development manager at Bellcore who fought against the "requirements" culture years before anybody talked about "rapid prototyping" or "agile development". He wouldn't issue long specifications; he'd lash together some combination of shell scripts and awk code that did roughly what was needed, [have] the customers [...] tell him whether or not they liked it. If they did, he would say "you can have it industrial strength so-many-months from now at such-and-such cost". His estimates tended to be accurate, but he lost out in the culture to managers who believed that requirements writers should be in control of everything.
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The original HTML documents recommend "be generous in what you accept", and it has bedeviled us ever since because each browser accepts a different superset of the specifications. It is the specifications that should be generous, not their interpretation.
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Doug McIlroy's advice to "do one thing well" is usually interpreted as being about simplicity. But it is also, implicitly and at least as importantly, about orthogonality.
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The sad thing is that most of the problems [Brooks] cites in [The Mythical Man-Month] are still happening today. [...] Maybe this is a good way to state the main problem facing the computing field: most of its practitioners have no understanding of computing history and so [...] they are condemned to repeat the same mistakes.
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Simplicity is often in tension with convenience. Convenience often wins in the short term, but simplicity always wins in the long term. The real trick is finding a way to get both simplicity and convenience. That is the secret sauce and it’s SO worth the effort.
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The Internet isn't really a technology, it's a belief system - a philosophy. [...] The belief system of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, the freedom to innovate and the freedom to hack without asking permission. No one can know the whole of it; it cannot be centrally controlled and the innovation happens in small groups on the "edges" of the network.
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Premature generalization is the other root of all evil.
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Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
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The only sin is to make a choice without knowing you are making one.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
— The Mythical Man-month
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In my opinion, perfection is not reached when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to remove. That means the perfection of a thing and its essence are a single reality. But here is the real challenge: how do you get to the essence of things?
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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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If there is no solution, then there is no problem.
— Les Shadoks
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But they are useless. They can only give you answers.
— (about computers)
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I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
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[Niklaus Wirth] used the compiler’s self-compilation speed as a measure of the compiler’s quality.
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Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
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A Programming Language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
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When we now take the position that it is not only the programmer's task to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.
— "Notes on structured programming", 1970
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The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
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My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.
— Computer Language, March 1983
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A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
— The First Law of Mentat, in Dune
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Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
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Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
— The Elements of Programming Style
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For a sucessful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.
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PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.
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Software Architecture is what is left when the code has crumbled.
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I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
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That C++ is not memory safe is simply a fact. It's not "bashing" anything. Had I said, for example, "C++ is a horrid mishmash of under-specified, overly-complex features piled on top of a brittle, dangerous memory model and I am thankful every day I no longer work in it for my own sanity", that would be bashing C++.
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This can be abused, but frankly - I am not in the business of stopping people from doing stupid things. The good thing about doing stupid things is that it tends to remove the person doing it from being productive, sooner or later. It is a self balancing equation.
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"If you could redesign Unix now, what would you do differently?" Ken Thompson : The easy answer is "I would spell creat with an e."
— "Ask a Google engineer"
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No, Mr. Database, you can not have my business logic. Your procedural ambitions will bear no fruit and you'll have to pry that logic from my dead, cold, object-oriented hands.
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Our biggest mistake: using the scary term 'Monad' rather than 'Warm Fuzzy Thing'
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Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
— Epigram in Programming #54, 1982
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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
— Epigram in Programming #19, 1982
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Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.
— Terre des Hommes
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May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.
— E.W.Dijkstra Archive: Convocation Speech, December 8, 1996 (EWD 1252)