System Complexity Quotes

UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.

There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.

We've got an extraordinarily complex tax system that's full of loopholes that are exploited by special interests. I'd like to see those loopholes closed.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.

Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the room for error.

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.

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

We have a complex system of government. You have to teach it to every generation.

Scaling is multidimensional. Different methods address different things.

The Iranian leaders describe the American government exactly the way American analysts describe the Iranian one, as an opaque, factionalized system with competing power centers, over which the president exercises very limited authority.

Our society is intertwined with the economy that we've built, which is a fantastically complex system. I hope that my writing about it might do some good, but that's not why I do it.

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.

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

But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.

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.

It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

Software is inherently complicated. If you say to somebody I want an airline reservation system, to really say what you want in terms of overbooking and fares, and different airlines communicating with each or schedule changes, it's immensely complex. And so you can't write a program that's any simpler than that full specification.

John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

Obama said they've had some glitches with the Affordable Care website. I'll tell you something. If you order a pair of pants online and they send you the wrong color, that's a glitch. This is like a Carnival cruise, for God's sake!

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