Quotes About Complexity

just because he was insane doesn't mean he was stupid.

One view at the highest levels of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by summer's end was that Karzai "was a very clever madman—just because he was insane doesn't mean he was stupid.

I'm just attracted to playing people who are ostensible unlikable. That's not to say that there's something in there that makes you care. It might be that you just find them so awful that you just can't stop watching, like a car crash.

Composite Simpler Than the Sum of Its Parts The API of a composite object should not be more complicated than that of any of its components.

cause and effect act in webs, not chains.

We have to realize what we are. The range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as if they somehow do not belong to our species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.

The only way woman can truly be completely satisfied is to get herself four different men--an old one, an ugly one, a Mandingo, and a gay guy.

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

The problem is there are no simple "right" answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

If something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it's less likely to be used.

The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile and counter-productive. Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account.

It's okay to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.

complicated code is a sign that you don't understand your program well enough to make it simple.

The goal is to minimize the amount of a program you have to think about at any one time. You might think of this as mental juggling—the more mental balls the program requires you to keep in the air at once, the more likely you'll drop one of the balls, leading to a design or coding error.

Reduce complexity. The single most important reason to create a routine is to reduce a program's complexity. Create a routine to hide information so that you won't need to think about it.

Inheritance adds complexity to a program, and, as such, it's a dangerous technique. As Java guru Joshua Bloch says, "Design and document for inheritance, or prohibit it." If a class isn't designed to be inherited from, make its members non-virtual in C++, final in Java, or non-overridable in Microsoft Visual Basic so that you can't inherit from it.

Building software implies various stages of planning, preparation and execution that vary in kind and degree depending on what's being built. [...] Building a four-foot tower requires a steady hand, a level surface, and 10 undamaged beer cans. Building a tower 100 times that size doesn't merely require 100 times as many beer cans.

few people can understand more than three levels of nested ifs

Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development. In my view, it's so important that Software's Primary Technical Imperative has to be managing complexity. Complexity is not a new feature of software development.

People are puzzles that way. We are complicated mechanisms. Just when you think that you have got a certain person all figured out they go and they change on you and you have to go and start that whole figuring-out process all over again from the beginning.

Their eyes met again, and this time there were no great answers there, only questions that would never be satisfied. A

Chapter the Eleventh: In Which the Plot, Behaving in Much the Manner Of a Soup to which Corn Starch Has been Added, Begins, at Last, to Thicken.

It's our nature, isn't it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief taht simple solutions exist

There was, in his mind, no truer measure of stupidity than to imagine that the world could be reduced to two sides