Quotes About Complexity

Fitzpatrick: Back when I was doing Perl-even for people that knew Perl really well-I would recommend MJD's Higher-Order Per!. The book is really fun in that it starts somewhat simple and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, I know what a closure is." And then it just continues to fuck with your head. By the end of the book, you're just blown away.

On the fourth hand, one reason I don't like IDEs quite so much is that they can make it hard to know when you've actually seen everything. Walking around in a graph, it's hard to know you've touched all the parts. Whereas if you've got some linear order, it's guaranteed to take you through everything.

I think the primary limitation on software is not the speed of computers but our ability to get our heads around what it's supposed to do.

The most depressing thing about life as a programmer, I think, is if you're faced with a chunk of code that either someone else wrote or, worse still, you wrote yourself but you no longer dare to modify. That's depressing.

Things have gotten faster but the software has gotten slower and buggier in the meantime.

When they realize, "Oh, my program's getting gigantic," what are they going to do? They're not going to know where to start. That's my first instinct because I'm a caveman. Really that probably doesn't even matter because you'll just throw more memory at it and it'll be fine.

Seibel: Some people love Lisp syntax and some can't stand it. Why is that? Deutsch: Well, I can't speak for anyone else. But I can tell you why I don't want to work with Lisp syntax anymore. There are two reasons. Number one, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the older I've gotten, the more important it is to me that the density of information per square inch in front of my face is high. The density of information per square inch in infix languages is higher than in Lisp.

El hecho de que la política esté cambiando cada vez más hacia la gestión de la fatalidad es propio de la naturaleza de los procesos multifactoriales. El juego con el azar se está volviendo, a su vez, cada vez más aleatorio.

Wer komplexe Wirklichkeit leugnet, gibt sich gern objektiv und bezichtigt die Problembewussten der Wirklichkeitsflucht und der Träumerei.

In this distinctive world, elusive quantities flash at the edge of conventional logic.

The first cities and states arose 5,000 years ago. One of these archaic states, the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2650–2150 BCE), the one that built the Great Pyramid of Giza, had a population of between one and two million, which is beginning to approach the social scale of the most complex social insects, ants and termites. The

the dynamical pattern characterizing sociopolitical instability in historical societies (see, for example Figure 1.1) is more complex than just a sequence of secular integrative (relatively stable) and disintegrative (relatively unstable) phases. The jagged, "saw-toothed" nature of the trajectory suggests that there is another, shorter cycle superimposed on the longer multi-century oscillations.

The past is no Roman road, but more often a maze...

Section144 (of the Criminal Procedure Code) slowed, confused, sometimes deflected the independence initiative. But the cat never closed in for the kill.That was never the intention. Besides there were, if you will, too many mice.

Much later, (S.A.Ayer) credited (Subhas Chandra) Bose with combining in his person "the qualities of Akbar, Shivaji and Vivekananda," which is a little like saying that Charles de Gaulle was Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Victor Hugo all rolled into one.

One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.

It's really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know 'em. We're all beautiful.

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted.

Let's just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

Why's a sticky word, though. It's not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it's not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.

Even God can't plan for everything. Too many variables.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." —Emerson M. Pugh

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

Hell, Neil Gaiman took a classic that nine-year-old Peter Watts devoured without any trouble at all—Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book—and dumbed it down to an (admittedly award-winning) story about ghosts and vampires, aimed at an audience who might find a story about sapient wolves and tigers too challenging. It may only be a matter of time before Nineteen Eighty Four is reissued using only words from the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.