Software Complexity Quotes

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.

Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.

Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.

If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs.

Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.

People are building the software and so having the pieces be such that a single person understands all the tradeoffs and everything that's going on in a piece is extremely valuable. It avoids getting into an experimental mode where you're just trying things out. That never works.

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

...One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that SOFTWARE IS HARD. From now on I shall have significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks.

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

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.

In software you can't really add people and expect to get more done, because their ability to understand the program and what's going on it would require so much investment and all their work would require so much review that you'd be more likely to slow things down.

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

Scrivener can be a tricky beast to get your head around. When you do, a bell rings, and suddenly it all seems perfectly clear. But to reach that stage you have to understand what it can do, and try it out for yourself. Which can be daunting.

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.

'PhotoCard' has 20 times as much code as the sum of 'QuickDraw,' 'MacPaint,' and 'HyperCard.' It is more elaborate and complicated, with all the client and server stuff. It took a lot more of me to do this than other projects, requiring an almost Mother Teresa dedication to do it.

Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.

Software is a gas ! It expands to fit the container it is in !

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.

A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want.

Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.

Walking is a skill that took millions of years for us to develop... If you wanted to design a robot that could walk as well as a person, this would be fantastically complicated software. It would have to be doing billions of calculations with every step.