Yukihiro Matsumoto Quotes

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

Scaling is multidimensional. Different methods address different things.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.

A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another.

The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

It is easy to turn a scooter, but not a train with 40 bogeys. This is such a big country, changes are constant and widespread.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

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

Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.

I thought I could rely on the plot in the novel and fill in the colour between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realise how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart.

Complexity is the enemy of clarity

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.

The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation.

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.