“The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.”
Tony Hoare
The Emperor’s Old Clothes (Primary source)
Tony Hoare’s brilliant Turing Award lecture where he reflects on software design and the importance of simplicity and elegance in programming.
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“At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”
Tony Hoare
“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.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? What is the linking thread which gathers these disparate branches into a single discipline? My answer to these questions is simple—it is the art of programming a computer.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“I realised that both verification and testing were using the same technology—assertions—on a common goal of improving software products in their speed of delivery, their quality, and their reliability.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary source“Nothing augments a battalion like success.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” she said. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary sourceSoftware Design Simplicity Reliability