Quotes About Complexity

We are each a dozen people who were all the same child.

You never have a friend all figured out. Just when you think you know what makes them tick, they tock.

In many areas of understanding, none so much as in our understanding of God, we bump up against a simplicity so profound that we must assign complexities to it to comprehend it at all. It is mindful of how we paste decals to a sliding glass door to keep from bumping our nose against it.

If you join two lives, there is oft a scar. They are one and one, with a shadowy third; One near one is too far.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.The honest thief, the tender murderer,The superstitious atheist, demirepThat loves and saves her soul in new French books.

All poetry is difficult to read,—The sense of it is, anyhow.

how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

Planetologist call it the conundrum of unforeseen ecological consequence. I call it the whack-a-mole rule of human meddling. She clasped both hands like a child hammering. WHACK! We change something here. Oops, that makes another problem pop up there where we didn't expect it. WHACK! So, we whack that mole. Oops! We're so smart that we're a menace.

Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system. It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity.

We programmers simply do not know how long things will take. This isn't because we are incompetent or lazy; it's because there is simply no way to know how complicated a task is going to be until that task is engaged and finished. But, as we'll see, all is not lost.

Factories are a complexity that can often be avoided, especially in the early phases of an evolving design.

Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. —Grady Booch

Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project, but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other. —Ralph Johnson

The majority of the cost of a software project is in long-term maintenance.

Because this ratio is so high, we want the reading of code to be easy, even if it makes the writing harder. Of course there's no way to write code without reading it, so making it easy to read actually makes it easier to write.

is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!

If only we could pull this off one more time. If only we could just say we were done with implementation. But we can't, because the thing about implementation is that is actually has to be done. Analysis and design are not binary deliverables. They do not have unambiguous completion criteria. There's no real way to know that you are done with them. So we might as well be done on time.

That these acts are simple doesn't mean that they are simplistic, and it hardly means that they are easy.

I used to think 2000 lines was a big program. After all, it was a full box of cards that weighed 10 pounds. Now, however, a program isn't really big until it exceeds 100,000 lines.

Duplication may be the root of all evil in software.

As they added more and more features, the code got worse and worse until they simply could not manage it any longer. It was the bad code that brought the company down.

What do we talk about when we talk about architecture?

Refactoring is a lot like solving a Rubik's cube. There are lots of little steps required to achieve a large goal. Each step enables the next.