Keith Devens .com

Some software quotes

While searching my blog for an old link I came across one of my favorite quotes about abstraction, from Joel Spolsky:

And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.

Also, this one from Knuth is new to me (via):

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

This one from Hoare is a classic:

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. The first method is far more difficult.

Full version I hadn't seen elsewhere from here. I liked this as well:

Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men. —Gerald M. Weinberg

I thought this quote applies, among other things, to the subject of Joel's article:

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure. —Hugh Kingsmill

I liked this page of quotes too.

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11:39 (utc-5)
edited: 13:35 (utc-5)