Quotes About Complexity

Supple design has a profound effect on the ability of software to cope with change and complexity.

When we set out to write software, we never know enough.

The complexity of a highly detailed interaction ends up being handled in the application layer, allowing domain knowledge to creep into the application or user interface code, where it is lost from the domain layer.

The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.

maybe when my mother claimed there was no word for love, she was really saying that no word could encompass all the different ways we find it.

In a complex system such as our world today, this is all it might take for the overall system to become destabilized, leading to a collapse.

We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

In the life cycle of a theory, it starts off simple and then gets fancier and fancier, as brainy thinkers mount objections and the theory's proponents develop more subtle, complex, and well-defended theory to stave them off. Then it dies. Actually, before it dies, it lives in a special preserve for theories too complicated to survive in the wild, called a university.

But I find it difficult to recognize people. Human beings are so much alike.

We are the sort of creature who not only needs to put up firewood and food for the winter but who must also predict the distant future, make decisions about who or what created the universe and what sort of principles and path we should follow, deal with our fellow difficult and dangerous creatures, and in other ways make sense of things that would overtax any creature.

herding cats and shoveling smoke.

By many measures, the Dominican Republic is a land of extremes.

My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder—they are analogous. For example

It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.

Como dicen en la teoría de sistemas, lo que optimiza una parte del sistema necesariamente debilita el sistema en su conjunto.)

She was honey-sweet and perfect... But that was just the surface layer; deeper there was more: darkness and sadness and pain

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.

Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

A rational mind is sometimes the queerest mixture of rationality and irrationality on earth.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

The problems of the Ludic Century are complex system problems. Environmental collapse, social inequity, the design of democracy itself—these seemingly intractable challenges are tied to our increasingly integrated and complicated world.

Design patterns should not be applied indiscriminately. Often they achieve flexibility and variability by introducing additional levels of indirection, and that can complicate a design and/or cost you some performance. A design pattern should only be applied when the flexibility it affords is actually needed.