If we seek truth, we shall find beauty

Architect Moshe Safdie, at TED 2007 quoting a poem he wrote years ago (video - this is at the end)

Full text courtesy of stereopsis

He who seeks truth shall find beauty.
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity.
He who seeks order shall find gratification.
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed.
He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self expression.
He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.
Arrogance is incompatible with nature.
Through nature, the nature of the universe, and the nature of man, we shall seek truth.
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.

Theology or religious speculation bears the same relationship to real experience as pornography does to lovemaking

--- Singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen

Source: Jon Pareles, "At lunch with Leonard Cohen: Philosophical Songwriter on a Wire", The New York Times, October 11, 1995, available at: http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/news3.html

In context:

I've always found theology a certain kind of delightful titillation. Theology or religious speculation bears the same relationship to real experience as pornography does to lovemaking. They're not entirely unconnected. I mean, you can get turned on. One of the reasons that they're both powerful is that they ignore a lot of other material and they focus in on something very specific. In these days of overload, it's very restful to know, at last, what you're talking about.

Any policy decision is a bet

Edmund Thomas, personal communication, 1 October 2007

Let us cultivate our garden

--- Voltaire, closing words of Candide (1759). In the marvellous George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (2003), Robert Darnton argues that the novel poses the question, "How can happiness be found?" Voltaire's answer, he suggests, is "Happiness lies in the cultivation of the garden."

Quote in context, in the translation by Philip Littell; available from Gutenberg.org:

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to
their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful
crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent
pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after
the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service
or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:

"There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds:
for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of
Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had
not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had
not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would
not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our
garden."

If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say

--- Philosopher Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, Oxford University Press 1989, Introduction, p. 9 (Google Books)

In context: The right attitude in philosophy is to accept aims that we can achieve only fractionally and imperfectly, and cannot be sure of achieving even to that extent. It means in particular not abandoing the pursuit of truth, even though if you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.

All decisions are based on models . . . and all models are

--- John D Sterman (J. Spencer Standish Professor of Management and Director of the System
Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management), section title in his Jay Wright Forrester Prize Lecture, 2002; published in System dynamics review, 18, no. 4, (2002): 501

Stepping from the title to the first lines [of a poem] is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.

--- poet Billy Collins, quoted in a Poetry Foundation profile, itself quoting a 1999 New York Times article by Bruce Weber.

As quoted on the Poetry Foundation site:

"I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I'm talking to, and I want to make sure I don't talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong."

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.

--- Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Ballantine Books, New York, 1984, p. 382

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial

--- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1820-72, Boston, 1909-14, IV, 160, cited by Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, New York, 1984, p. 23

Tuchman comments: "This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect. They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do. The trappings of power deceive us, endowing the possessor with a quality larger than life."

As elegant as modern econometrics has become, it is not up to the task of delivering policy prescriptions

--- banker and regulator Alan Greenspan, in his memoir The Age of Turbulence, quoted in a BusinessWeek book review, 1 October 2007

In context, in the BW review:

But equally important—and far less noticed—is Greenspan's disdain for academic economics. "As elegant as modern-day econometrics has become, it is not up to the task of delivering policy prescriptions," Greenspan writes. "The world economy has become too complex and interlinked." Indeed, academic economists are virtually nonexistent in the book. Greenspan's successor, Princeton University economist Ben Bernanke, is mentioned only once, in a photo caption.

Government is a reality of life. Denying it is just letting your biases influence your business judgment

--- MCI founder Bill McGowan, quoted by Stephen Keating in Cutthroat: High stakes and Killer Moves on the Electronic Frontier (1999), p. 147, citing a Washington Post Magazine article by Greg Critser, 6/16/96

[Al Gore] never had great political instincts. He did have a keen sense for opportunities that might make headlines

--- Mike Kopp, Gore’s former press secretary, quoted by Stephen Keating in Cutthroat: High stakes and Killer Moves on the Electronic Frontier (1999), p. 97

Quote in context:

“We never operated from a political strategy, we just chased opportunities,” said Mike Kopp, Gore’s former press secretary. “If you look at a list of his hearings, it was all over the map. It was like a buffet he was sampling. We tried to do that on a presidential level and it was a different game. He never had great political instincts. He did have a keen sense for opportunities that might make headlines.”

Wisdom and knowledge are not the same, and speech dominated by intellectual knowledge hardly ever contains wisdom

--- Ayya Khema, "Come and See for Yourself: The Buddhist Path to Happiness," Windhorse Publications 2002, p. 147

Quote in context:

"A certain satisfaction with our abilities can be skilful, but the pride that suggests to us we have more knowledge or ability than other people serves only to leave us even more separate from others than before. If we relate in this way, the language of the heart is suppressed because we are coming only from the logical intellect which is often devoid of the qualities of the heart. This is why spiritual pride impedes those who have acquired a lot of knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge are not the same, and speech dominated by intellectual knowledge hardly ever contains wisdom. Knowledge is helpful only if it can be put into action. Think a bit less and act a bit more! Teresa of Avila said, ‘Stop thinking so much; start loving more!’"

Ten years ago, companies would call up and say I need a digital strategy.' Now, it's I need a green strategy.'

--- Chris Hunter, a former energy manager at Johnson & Johnson, who works for the environmental consulting firm GreenOrder. Quoted in BusinessWeek story Little Green Lies, about the difficulty in making "being green" profitable.

The story features Austen Schendler and his experience trying to follow Amory Lovins' evangelism and help Aspen Skiing be a green company. According to BW, he sums up his experience thus: "I've succeeded in doing a lot of sexy projects yet utterly failed in what I set out to do. How do you really green your company? It's almost f------ impossible."

The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded

--- Paul Saffo, quoted in The Economist, "Social graph-iti: There's less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye," Oct 18th 2007

Quote in context, from the article:

This analogy to address books points to an important limitation for social networks, such as Facebook, compared with older sorts of network, such as the postal or telephone systems. These benefit from Metcalfe's Law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. In other words, the more people have phones, the more useful they become. This “network effect” leads to rapid adoption and puts up barriers for new entrants.

But unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. “The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,” says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect. Already, social networks such as “aSmallWorld”, an exclusive site for the rich and famous, are proliferating. Such networks recognise that people want to hobnob with a chosen few, not to be spammed by random friend-requests.

This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline. No single company, therefore, can capture the social graph. Ning, a fast-growing company with offices directly across the street from Facebook in Palo Alto, is built around this idea. It lets users build their own social networks for each circle of friends.

So are Facebook and its graph really worth many billions?

A "trusted computer" is a computer they can trust not to do what I want

--- David Clark, comment at TPRC 2007, Sunday 30 Sep 2007, during the panel "Research Initiatives for a Future Internet"

Dignity is more important that wealth

--- Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, at TEDGlobal Africa, 5 June 2007, reported by Ethan Zuckerman

Vida sin amigos, muerte sin testigos

A Spanish proverb, roughly translated, "Life without a friend is death without a witness."

Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity

--- Bill Gates, prepared text for Harvard Commencement, June 7, 2007,

Quote in context:

But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.

Evolution favours what is good at replicating itself, rather than what is good.

--- John Kay, Culture and Prosperity: Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor (2005), quoted by Andrew Taylor in his post Evolution vs. adaptation vs. ultimate good

In the blog Taylor gives a slightly longer quote: "Evolution favours what is good at replicating itself, rather than what is good. This fundamental distinction is essential to understanding any evolving system."

Taylor comments:

"We can easily see in human history (and I see it in my own biases) a presumption that evolving systems slowly create better results. We've used the argument in reinforcing the supremacy of humans on the earth (animals and nature are in service to man, because man was the one to evolve the best). And we often use the bundled assumption in describing healthy organizations -- in the arts and elsewhere.

"But Kay's simple point cuts to the heart of these assumptions. Evolution -- and even adaptation -- are extraordinarily effective at advancing what can be replicated. But they have nothing to do with selecting and advancing the best responses for any larger challenge. In fact, established organizational cultures are highly effective at perpetuating themselves through these very systems."

The Delphic oracle’s guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle’s advice might be show thyself.

--- Christine Rosen, senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism", New Atlantis, Summer 2007, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/17/rosen.htm

It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.

--- Trappist monk Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, p. 122; cited by Bret Battey

Until proven otherwise, we should assume that consciousness doesn't play a role in human behaviour. This is the conservative position that makes the fewest assumptions.

--- Robert Provine, quoted in Mark Buchanan, Why we are all creatures of habit, New Scientist 7 Jul 07, p. 37

Other quotes along the same vein:

Alex Pentland: "The data support the view that a lot of human behaviour is largely automatic and determined by instincts alone."

Ap Dijksterhuis: "Almost everything we do is automatic. I'm more and more inclined to draw the conclusion that consciousness is a pretty unimportant thing."

Buchanan writes: "Provine goes even further. He suspects we only think we act consciously because our inner voice is so skilled at making up seemingly reasonable narratives and explanations of our unconsciously generated behaviour."

There's a resonance with Michael Brian Schiffer's theory of communication that focuses on receivers and artifacts rather than senders and words. From the article: "Researchers studying apes and other animals typically start from the idea that animals' actions follow mechanically and automatically from their instincts alone. In contrast, psychologists tend to view people as mostly self-aware individuals acting on conscious thoughts. Pentland's idea is that if we can explain and even predict much of what people do without ever referring to their words or conscious thoughts, then maybe those aren't as important as we usually believe. It is a radical thesis, but one for which his sensors provide strong support."

Buddhism takes realization of basic existential problems as a route to peace, when such realizations are more typically considered the basis for despair

--composer Bret Battey, email 8 Sep 07 (quoted with permission)

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.

--- Jane Hirshfield, from the poem Poem with Two Endings, in Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001(

You can’t get rid of ambiguity and uncertainty—they are the flip side of opportunity

--- UCLA business professor Richard Rumelt, interview with Dan P. Lovallo and Lenny T. Mendonca, McKinsey Quarterly 5 Sep 2007 (membership wall)

In context: "Strategic thinking helps us take positions in a world that is confusing and uncertain. You can’t get rid of ambiguity and uncertainty—they are the flip side of opportunity. If you want certainty and clarity, wait for others to take a position and see how they do. Then you’ll know what works, but it will be too late to profit from the knowledge."

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

--- Andre Gide. Quoted widely, but I have not found a source citation. Some versions have "new oceans" or "new continents" in place of "new lands". It's not in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, or Bartelby.com's collection of quotation references. It may be apocryphal.

Update 21 Oct 2007: Bret Battey, with a little help from books.google, found the reference: The Counterfeiters. In 1951 Knopf version in books.google.com, either Page 49 or 326 (can't tell for sure from the listing).

The good has to happen first in our own hearts. Only then can goodness and purity come out of it. We can't give away what we don't have.

--- Ayya Khema, from the discourse "Talking to One Another," p. 50, Be an Island, 1999

If we're looking for outer conditions to bring us contentment, we're looking in vain. We have to find inner conditions conducive to contentment. One of them is independence - not financial independence, which may bring other hazards, but emotional independence from the approval of others. This entails knowling that we are trying to do the best we can, and if someone disapproves, that's just the way things are. . . .

To be independent also includes no looking for support from others. Sometimes the best we can do may be very good, sometimes it is mediocre. That too has to be accepted. . . . If we sometimes cannot do as well as we thought we could, that is also all right and no reason for discontentment.

Emotional independence requires having a loving heart. If we are looking for love, we are emotionally dependent and often discontented because we don't get what we want, or don't get enough of it. Even if we do get enough, we still cannot count on it to fill our needs. To look for love is a totally unsatisfactory and unfulfilling endeavor. What does work, however, is loving others, which brings emotional independence and contentment. Loving others is possible whether the other person reciprocates or not. Love has nothing to do with the other, but is a quality of our own hearts.

--- Ayya Khema, in the discourse "Harmonious Living," p. 41-41, in Be an Island, 1999

He lives well who lives lightly,
hoards nothing,
lets go the air he breathes-
to draw in more

Peter Abbs, in The Flowering of Flint: Selected Poems, quoted in a review in the Economist, 11 Aug 2007

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

--- Donald Knuth, Email (let's drop the hyphen)

In context:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter to the following address. . .

Our evolutionary history determined that we become [sic] a cultural creature, but did not determine what kind of culture we would have. Hence our problem today is not whether to have a culture; it is what kind of culture to have.

--- Ervin Laszlo, The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time, Hampton Press 1996, Ch. 4, "The Systems View of Ourselves," p. 75

The music industry is growing. The record industry is not growing.

--- Edgar Bronfman, chairman of Warner Music, at a New York investor conference, June 2007, as quoted in "A change of tune," The Economist, July 5th 2007

According to Aristotle's commendable formula . . . the beautiful is defined as that which the eye can easily embrace in its entirety and which can be surveyed as a whole.

--- Friedrich Kittler, "The World of the Symbolic--A World of the Machine", cited by http://noraproject.org/. Text via Google Books

This is evocative because it connects cognitive capacity to aesthetics, not least the aesthetics of programmers who use elegance as a criterion for good code.

The Hopi way cherishes the intangible: the riches realized from interaction and interrelationships with all beings above all else. Great abundances of material things, even food, the Hopi elders believe, tend to lure human attention away from what is most valuable and important. The views of the Hopi elders are not much different from those elders in all the Pueblos.

---Leslie Marmon Silko, Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination, The Migration Story: and Interior Journey, in Antaeus, no. 57, Autumn 1986, reprinted in The Norton Books of Nature Writing, eds. Robert Finch and John Elder, 1990

Being an Oxford graduate is like having a permanent source of emotional central heating. Whatever happens to you later in life, the fact that you were once at Oxford marks you out as someone who was destined for greatness before accountancy beckoned.

--- Guy Browning, Oxford Today, Trinity Issue 2007, p. 64

A happy woman is one who has no cares at all; a cheerful woman is one who has cares but doesn't let them get her down.

--- Beverly Sills. More great quotes at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/beverly_sills.html

For example: "Attachment to spiritual things is... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else. "

[T]he American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

Matt Taibi, in Adbusters column The American Left's Silly Victim Complex

More:

"It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little. "

Quoting David Sirota: "Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not really a grassroots movement. . . . You have this donor/elite class, and then you have the public . . . You have these zillionaires who are supposedly funding the progressive movement. At some point that gets to be a problem."

"Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal-Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna. "

Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, 2007, p. 166

Quote in context:

"[A European-owned financial institution where he worked in the summer of 1998] wanted to distinguish itself by being rigorous and far-sighted. The unit involved in trading had five managers, all serious-looking (always in dark blue suits, even on dress-down Fridays), who had to meet throughout the summer in order “to formulate the five-year plan.” . . . The managers flew across the world in order to meet: Barcelona, Hong Kong, et cetera. A lot of miles for a lot of verbiage. Needless to say they were usually sleep-deprived. Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules."

Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

--- Seagate Technology CEO Bill Watkins, at dinner in San Francisco 28 Nov 2006, reported by Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune senior editor in Seagate CEO: I help people "watch porn", 30 Nov 2006

During the dot-com bubble, you needed $5 million to do stupid ideas. Now you can do stupid ideas for 12 grand

--- Guy Kawasaki, on doing Web 2.0 start-ups, quoted in a WSJ story on Truemors, Lee Gomes, "In New Net Economy, Everyone Gets to Be Stupid for 15 Minutes," The Wall Street Journal, 16 May 2007

More from the WSJ story: "Apparently, Web businesses now aren't much harder to make than YouTube videos. Mr. Kawasaki says he has been working on Truemors for just three months. Because it uses free software, with programming done by a for-hire outfit in called Electric Pulp located in the high tech mecca of South Dakota, the costs are minimal. Mr. Kawasaki says to date, he has spent $12,000 on Truemors. "

Using the word design to describe [how processes exit on Windows XP] is like using the term swimming pool to refer to a puddle in your garden

--- Colleague, cited by Raymond Chen in Quick overview of how processes exit on Windows XP.

In context:

"I should say up front that I do not agree with many steps in the way processes exit on Windows XP. The purpose of this mini-series is not to justify the way processes exit but merely to fill you in on some of the behind-the-scenes activities so you are better-armed when you have to investigate into a mysterious crash or hang during exit. (Note that I just refer to it as the way processes exit on Windows XP rather than saying that it is how process exit is designed. As one of my colleagues put it, "Using the word design to describe this is like using the term swimming pool to refer to a puddle in your garden.") "

We must not forget that it is not our business to make programs, it is our
business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.

--- Edsger Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, ACM Turing Lecture 1972, published in Commun. ACM 15 (1972), 10: 859-866

In context:

I now suggest that we confine ourselves to the design and implementation of intellectually manageable programs. If someone fears that this restriction is so severe that we cannot live with it, I can reassure him: the class of intellectually manageable programs is still sufficiently rich to contain many very realistic programs for any problem capable of algorithmic solution. We must not forget that it is not our business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.

[A]s long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we
had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have
gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem.

--- Edsger Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, ACM Turing Lecture 1972, published in Commun. ACM 15 (1972), 10: 859-866

Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers.

--- David Lorge Parnas, Software aspects of strategic defense systems, Communications of the ACM, December 1985, Vol. 28, No. 12

In context:

Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers. From a distance they may appear much alike, but when closely examined they are quite different. I don’t think we can learn much about one by studying the other. AI offers no magic technology to solve our problem. Heuristic techniques do not yield systems that one can trust.

Even in highly structured [software] systems, surprises and unreliability occur because the human mind is not able to fully comprehend the many conditions that can arise because of the interaction of these components.

--- David Lorge Parnas, Software aspects of strategic defense systems, Communications of the ACM, December 1985, Vol. 28, No. 12


In context:

Dividing software into modules and building each module of so-called “structured” programs clearly helps. When properly done, each component deals with a small number of cases and can be completely analyzed. However, real software systems have many such components, and there is no repetitive structure to simplify the analysis. Even in highly structured systems, surprises and unreliability occur because the human mind is not able to fully comprehend the many conditions that can arise because of the interaction of these components. Moreover, finding the right structure has proved to be very difficult. Well-structured real software systems are still rare.

I conjecture that most multi-threaded general-purpose applications are, in fact, so full of concurrency bugs that as multi-core architectures become commonplace, these bugs will begin to show up as system failures.

--- Edward A. Lee, professor of computer science, UC Berkely, in "The Problem with Threads,"
Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2006-1, January 10, 2006

He continues:

This scenario is bleak for computer vendors: their next generation of machines will become widely known as the ones on which many programs crash. These same computer vendors are advocating more multi-threaded programming, so that there is concurrency that can exploit the parallelism they would like to sell us. Intel, for example, has embarked on an active campaign to get leading computer science academic programs to put more emphasis on multi-threaded programming. If they are successful, and the next generation of programmers makes more intensive use of multithreading, then the next generation of computers will become nearly unusable.

We understand complex things by systematically breaking them into successively simpler parts and understanding how these parts fit together locally. Thus, we have different levels of understanding, and each of these levels corresponds to an abstraction of the detail at the level it is composed from. For example, at one level of abstraction, we deal with an integer without considering wehterh it is represented in binary notation or two’s complement, etc., while at deeper levels this representation may be important. At more abstract levels the precise value of the integer is not important except as it related to other data.

--- Donald E Knuth, “Structured Programming with go to Statements,” Computing Surveys, Vol. 6, No. 4, December 1974, p. 291

Knuth goes on to provide an excerpt of Charles L. Baker’s 1957 review of McCracken’s first book on programming:

Break the problem into small, self-contained subroutines, trying at all times to isolate the various sections of coding as much as possible . . . [then] the problem is reduced to many much smaller ones. The truth of this seems very obvious to the experienced coder, yet it is hard to put across to the newcomer.

[Knuth’s citation: Baker, Charles L, “Review of D. D. McCracken, Digital Computer Programming,” Math. Comput. 11 (1957), 298-305]

The problem with being clever is you’re not

--- A saying among developers, reported by Adam Sapek, personal email, 15 April 2007

A civil engineer doesn’t rebel against gravity

- Adam Sapek, personal email, 17 april 2007, exploring why programming is not like engineering. In context:

"[Why is it so rare that software is built as predictably and reliably as bridges?] The first reason is that programmers realize that limitations are arbitrary and don’t like them. A civil engineer doesn’t rebel against gravity; for a programmer the equivalent is PHB ."