My absolute favorite to kick off this list:
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.”
– Phil Karlton
later evolved to
“There are two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.”
If you are wondering how naming things could be hard, I suggest checking out these posts [0] [1].
“The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.”
– Pinboard
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” (Gall’s law)
– John Gall
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
– Edsger W. Dijkstra
“Excessive complexity is nature’s punishment for organizations that are unable to make decisions.” (Gregor’s law)
– Gregor Hohpe
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” (Kernighan’s Law)
– Brian Kernighan
“Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.”
– Piet Hein, Grooks 1
“If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough.”
– Alan Kay
“Data dominates. If you’ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.”
– Rob Pike
Programming Is About Code, But Programs Are About Data: All programs transform data, converting an input into an output. Start designing using transformations.
– David Thomas & Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer
“Developers are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame, often with the same outcome.”
– Neal Ford
First make it work, then make it right, and, finally, make it fast.
– Kent Beck
“The key to understanding complicated things is knowing what not to look at.”
– Gerald Jay Sussman
“Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” (Conway’s law)
– Melvin E. Conway
“Focus is about saying, No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.”
– Steve Jobs, WWDC 1997
Writing more code than you need results in Ugly, Large and Slow code. Ugly: Leaves places for bugs to hide. Large: Ensures incomplete tests. Slow: Encourages the use of shortcuts and dirty tricks.
– Bjarne Stroustrup
“I’m not going to refactor the code yet, because the code doesn’t know yet where it wants to go.”
– Kent Beck
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” (Brooks’s law)
– Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
“The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one.” (Second-system syndrome)
– Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
“The Lindy effect is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age.” (Lindy’s Law)
– Albert Goldman
“At scale, everything breaks no matter what you do and you have to deal reasonably cleanly with that and try to hide it from the people actually using your system.”
– Urs Hölzle
“Infrastructure is software that you are running because you have to, in order to run the stuff that you want to.”
– Charity Majors
“Problems can usually be solved with simple, mundane solutions. That means there’s no glamorous work. You don’t get to show off your amazing skills. You just build something that gets the job done and then move on. This approach may not earn you oohs and aahs, but it lets you get on with it.”
– Jason Fried
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
– Henry Petroski
“Unfortunately, most warning systems do not warn us that they can no longer warn us.”
– Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies
“Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” (Hofstadter’s Law)
– Douglas Hofstadter
What Kelly did in his approach was to simplify everything and above all keep the momentum going. The way he put it was, “I’d rather make a wrong decision that keeps things moving forward than to stop anything for several weeks to make sure that we’re making the right decision.”
– On Kelly Johnson’s philosophy, Secrets in the Sky: The Untold Story of Skunk Works
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Goodhart’s law)
– Charles Goodhart
“The biggest concern for any organization should be when their most passionate people become quiet.”
– Tim McClure
“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” (Peter principle)
– Laurence J. Peter
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” (Brandolini’s law)
– Alberto Brandolini
“Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.”
– Carl Richards
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
– Steve Jobs
“The only success in life is to live it in your own way.”
– Christopher Morley
“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.”
– Frederick P. Brooks
Nathan’s four Laws of Software:
- Software is a gas. Software always expands to fit whatever container it is stored in.
- Software grows until it becomes limited by Moore’s law. The growth of software is initially rapid, like gas expanding, but is inevitably limited by the rate of increase in hardware speed.
- Software growth makes Moore’s law possible. People buy new hardware because the software requires it.
- Software is limited only by human ambition and expectation. We will always find new algorithms, new applications, and new users.
– Nathan Myhrvold
“It isn’t what a man has that constitutes wealth. No–it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn’t rich.”
– Mark Twain
“The only reason the world seemed like a better place during your childhood is because you were a child.”
– Jon Stewart
“History never repeats itself. Man always does.”
– Voltaire
“No brilliant idea was ever born in a conference room,” he assured the Dane. “But a lot of silly ideas have died there,” said Stahr.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”
– Donald Rumsfeld