James Gosling Quotes

Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.

Corporations want stable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain systems.

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions.

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.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

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

Software is now so complex - requiring so many gazillions of tiny files all over your computer - that most consumers don't want to bother to know what's really going on.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.

Correct" is a property of small systems.

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

People crave predictability, and when you design and use systems, you give people predictability. More importantly, when you build systems, they can help you orchestrate, and orchestration helps you create the habits that continuously improve the systems!

We closely track the systems Boeing builds for us, and they're some very capable systems. So that's been my focus. It is something that I look at every month. I look at the metrics for all major combat systems and our platforms, which Boeing builds many, and they're successful platforms.

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 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.

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.

At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.

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

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.

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.

A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes part of the whole of the next. In other words, natural hierarchies are composed of holons.