“Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it.”
– Alan Perlis (Turing Award #1, ALGOL)
“Computer Science is the first engineering discipline in which the complexity of the objects created is limited solely by the skill of the creator, and not by the strength of raw materials.”
– Brian Reid (Grace Murray Hopper Award)
“I think most programmers spend the first 5 years of their career mastering complexity, and the rest of their lives learning simplicity.”
– Buzz Andersen
“Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.”
– Noam Chomsky
“I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.”
– Fred Brooks (Turing Award #34, Mythical Man Month, No Silver Bullet)
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
– Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize, Biography)
“There’s a point when you’re done simplifying. Otherwise, things get really complicated.”
– Frank Chimero
“To me, legacy code is simply code without tests. I’ve gotten some grief for this definition… I have no problem defining legacy code as code without tests. It is a good working definition, and it points to a solution.”
– Michael Feathers (Legacy Code)