Bill Gates Quotes

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

A lot of things can't be modeled very well.

Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.

Everything is getting bigger. The way to go now is to program in a little more sophistication.

Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.

Correct" is a property of small systems.

There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.

To process and close models in 50 states and 2,000-plus counties with the myriad of, just, tens of thousands of different regulations, customs, vendors - it's a monster. So the only way to do that is with technology. It really is rocket science.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.

A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just within or just beyond our reach; and software systems are perhaps the most intricate and complex of man's handiworks. The management of this complex craft will demand our best use of new languages and systems, our best adaptation of proven engineering management methods, liberal doses of common sense, and a God-given humility to recognize our fallibility and limitations.

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the room for error.

Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer.

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

Sophisticated ignorance, write my curses in cursive.