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WordsOfWisdom
Words of Wisdom (?)
"I conclude 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. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. It also requires a willingness to ... accept a compromise when conflicting objectives cannot be met. No committe will ever do this until it is too late."
-- C. A. R. Hoare, The Emperor's Old Clothes
"Any organization that designs a system ... will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."
-- Melvin Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
Conway also gives us Four Lessons In 40 Years.
"We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of stratified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages."
-- Abelson & Sussman, SICP (section 2.2.4)
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas."
-- Alan Kay
"The whole point of Forth was that you didn't write programs in Forth you wrote vocabularies in Forth. When you devised an application you wrote a hundred words or so that discussed the application and you used those hundred words to write a one line definition to solve the application. It is not easy to find those hundred words, but they exist, they always exist."
-- Charles Moore
http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm
http://users.rcn.com/eslowry/
Ed Lowry - Advanced Information MicroStructures
Fric Sept 16, 2005 (55:20)
Meeting of Mass. Technology Leadership Council
He wrote a thesis at MIT in early 60's about simplifying software. At the meeting he stated:
"I have observed that the software leadership has been very hostile towards simplification of software and very hostile towards the truth about simplification of software. As a result they have not learned very much about the fine structure of information. The results are very disasterous in many ways."
"We can say some final words about data formats today. The right structure for pieces of information is hierarchically interconnected pointers. It's the same as saying that pillars should be vertical, the floors should be horizontal and wheels should be round, but if you don't pay attention to simplification you won't notice that".
Our documentation manager was showing her two year old son around the office. He was introduced to me, at which time he pointed out that we were both holding bags of popcorn. We were both holding bottles of juice. But only he had a lollipop.
He asked his mother, "Why doesn't HE have a lollipop?"
Her reply: "He can have a lollipop any time he wants to. That's what it means to be a programmer."
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