Quotes of the Week: Complexity

We complify where we should simplicate.

- Dan North,  Hard Things Made Easy

Somewhere in the history of building web applications on the JVM, adding layers somehow became part of the solution without being seen as a problem.

- Play for Java

Complexity is an expensive luxury… powerful solutions do not have to be complex!

- Rod Johnson,  Lessons Learned from JavaEE

You can only build so much on top of something else, before you have to wipe the slate clean and start over.

- John Sonmez, Why JavaScript Is Doomed

The amount of complexity I'm willing to tolerate is proportional to the size of the problem being solved. There will come a point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one.

- Ryan Dahl 

People pile layers on top of layers, abstractions on top of abstractions, complications on top of complications, crap on top of patches, and patches on top of crap until everything collapses onto itself and the singularity appears.

- Comment to Ryan Dahl

OOP programs built as towering hierarchies of classes are like perfect crystals, to be admired by architects everywhere but loathed by the programmers responsible for maintaining them.

- Reginald Braithwaite, OOP practiced backwards is "POO"

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

- Alan Kay