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Quotes relating to System Design

 
Ranch Hand
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There are a few quotes I think of when thinking about computer design. These are not specifically about computers, but I think they are appropriate.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French writer (1900 - 1944)

"Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Steve Jobs -[BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998,]

Often contentious topics can labour under the assumption that it makes any difference in the first place.
DEVENTER (n) A decision that's very hard to make because so little depends on it, such as which way to walk around a park

-- The Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.
Everyone can learn something from your mistakes
Mistakes - It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant on on Despair.com

Remember to keep what you are doing relevant
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done. ~Andy Rooney

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other. ~Bill Gates

Making things simple and clear should be much of the design effort. Not just something which works.
A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind. ~Joseph Weizenbaum

Doing very little, often enough, can quickly add up.
The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad! ~Richard Feynman
 
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source
 
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"When your hammer is C++, every problem looks like a thumb."

"If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs."

"All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors." ~Author Unknown

"A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." ~Doug Linder

"Writing the first 90 percent of a computer program takes 90 percent of the time. The remaining ten percent also takes 90 percent of the time and
the final touches also take 90 percent of the time." ~N.J. Rubenking

"If you cannot grok the overall structure of a program while taking a shower, e.g., with no external memory aids, you are not ready to code it." ~Richard Pattis

And my personal favorite....

"It's the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you
have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation." ~Andy Hertzfeld, about programming
 
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"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." — William E. Vaughan
 
lowercase baba
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Recently came across this (and it's my current .sig here, but that will change someday):

There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors
 
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