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.

-- C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture





The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

-- E. W. Dijkstra





The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.

-- Gordon Bell





One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.

-- Ken Thompson





When in doubt, use brute force.

-- Ken Thompson





Deleted code is debugged code.

-- Jeff Sickel





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.

-- Brian W. Kernighan





The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

-- Brian W. Kernighan, in the paper Unix for Beginners (1979)







Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

-- Brian Kernigan





Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.

-- David Gelernter







UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.

-- Doug Gwyn





If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better.

-- John Carmack