Niklaus Wirth Quotes

Management does not know what a system is.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the 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.

If you've got good systemising skills you can apply them to systems you aren't familiar with, and look for patterns.

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

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

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

We think of enterprise architecture as the process we use for fully describing and mapping business functionality and business requirements and relating them to information systems requirements.

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

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

Simply put, when you have very large pieces of software, most of the tools look at the individual lines of code as text. It is often extremely powerful to look not at individual pieces of code but at a system as a whole.

The world is complex, and so too must be the activities that we perform. But that doesn't mean that we must live in continual frustration. No. The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity, to turn what would appear to be a complicated tool into one that fits the task, that is understandable, usable, enjoyable.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.

It must be evident how multifarious and how mutually complicated are the considerations which the working of such an engine involve. There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or less degree exercising a mutual influence.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

Software is inherently complicated. If you say to somebody I want an airline reservation system, to really say what you want in terms of overbooking and fares, and different airlines communicating with each or schedule changes, it's immensely complex. And so you can't write a program that's any simpler than that full specification.

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

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.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

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

I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.