“Above all, I did not allow anything to be done which I did not myself understand. It worked!”
Tony Hoare (verified)
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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How did we recover from the catastrophe? First, we classified our 503 customers into groups, according to the nature and size of the hardware configurations which they had bought... We assigned to each group of customers a small team of programmers and told the team leader to visit the customers to find out what they wanted; to select the easiest request to fulfill, and to make plans (but no promises) to implement it. In no case would we consider a request for a feature that would take more than three months to implement and deliver. The project leader would then have to convince me that the customers’ request was reasonable, that the design of the new feature was appropriate, and that the plans and schedules for implementation were realistic. Above all, I did not allow anything to be done which I did not myself understand. It worked! The software requested began to be delivered on the promised dates. With an increase in our confidence and that of our customers, we were able to undertake fulfilling slightly more ambitious requests. Within a year we had recovered from the disaster. Within two years, we even had some moderately satisfied customers.
Tony Hoare (verified)
“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 (verified)“The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.”
— Tony Hoare (verified)“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 (verified)“I was eventually persuaded of the need to design programming notations so as to maximize the number of errors which cannot be made, or if made, can be reliably detected at compile time.”
— Tony Hoare (verified)“This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
— Ernest Hemingway (verified)“I think that to keep trying new solutions is the way to do everything.”
— Richard Feynman (verified)“If you always tell people why, they’ll understand it better, they’ll consider it more important, and they’ll be more likely to comply. Even if they don’t understand your reason, they’ll be more likely to comply.”
— Charlie Munger (verified)“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! […] Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.”
— Winston Churchill (verified)