Tony Hoare Quotes

There is no one "root of all evil" in software development. Design is hard in many ways. People tend to underestimate the intellectual and practical difficulties involved in building a significant system involving software. It is not and will not be reduced to a simple mechanical "assembly line" process. Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

'PhotoCard' has 20 times as much code as the sum of 'QuickDraw,' 'MacPaint,' and 'HyperCard.' It is more elaborate and complicated, with all the client and server stuff. It took a lot more of me to do this than other projects, requiring an almost Mother Teresa dedication to do it.

Life is simple unless we find a way to make it complicated.

Simple things are always the most difficult.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

It's all very simple. But maybe because it's so simple, it's also hard.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity.

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

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it's easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it's hard to fix.

Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

We have complicated every simple gift of the gods.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

"Simple" is a tricky word, it can mean a lot of things. To us, it just means clear. That doesn't always mean total reduction, or minimalism - sometimes, to make things clearer, you have to add a step.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

It's really complex to make something simple.