372 Design Quotes

Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

The old chess is too limited. Imagine playing cards, black jack for example, and every time the dealer has the same starting hand you have the same starting hand. What's the point?

Simplicity is the key to brilliance.

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

I certainly think that when I flick through all the magazines at the hairdresser's I like to see and am drawn to images that have an intelligence and mind at work behind them.

The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.

[I]f we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.

The course of Nature is the art of God.

The more physics you have the less engineering you need.

Perfect beauty implies perfect simplicity, a quality that at first sight does not arouse the emotions which we feel before gigantic works, objects whose very disproportion constitutes an element of beauty.

Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.

Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture.

Less is only more where more is no good.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the 'Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants,' and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.

Make the suspension adjustable and they will adjust it wrong -- look what they can do to a Weber carburetor in just a few moments of stupidity with a screwdriver.

To add speed, add lightness.

Audiences and critics acknowledge that a play or concerto gains force in great rendition. A good play may overcome bad staging. A great concerto may survive a poor soloist. But it is naturally assumed that a more accomplished performance intensifies the impact of the work. The play's text or concerto's score does not change, but the right actors and musicians help realize its full potential. Among contemporary literary critics, however, one never encounters this notion in regard to books and printing. To recognize the sensual contributions of the physical elements of a book is somehow assumed to demean the spiritual purity of the text. To notice the book itself smacks of philistinism, and to make distinctions based on paper, binding, and typography brings accusations of elitism or decadence.

Bob de Graff, who started Pocket Books, had a patent on a non-re-readable book, bound like a sealed memo pad, from which you would tear each page after you'd read it.

Interviewer: On the cover of 'Decemberunderground' there are three rabbits. Do you like rabbits because they run so fast, or because they have sex all the time? Davey: um, It's because they're furry. Hunter: I like them because they run so fast. They just run SO fast. Davey: Yeah, they do go fast don't they? Ok I would like to change it to because they run so fast.

Wouldn't it be nice if you download what your car alarm sounds, like a ring-tone?

Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.

He exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if you were to wear your entrails on top of your head.

I would like to have a free architecture. Architecture that belonged where you see it standing - and is a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace.

The part of our social order which can or ought to be made a conscious product of human reason is only a small part of all the forces of society.

A DM only rolls the dice because of the noise they make.

The kind of doorhandles which is recessed a little bit into the door and your fingers actually go in a little before they actually grab it. Don't you like that? I like that. That's why they're not going to make it anymore. They found out we liked that.

When this you see remember me.

Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. ... the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.

The universal Intellect is the intimate, most real, peculiar and powerful part of the soul of the world. This is the single whole which filleth the whole, illumineth the universe and directeth nature to the production of natural things, as our intellect with the congruous production of natural kinds.

It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of 'mere technical details.' The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkward, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solution requires manpower, time and money.

There were the Mountains in the background. They did get nearer, very slowly. They did not seem to belong to the picture, or only as a link to something else, a glimpse through the trees of something different, a further stage: another picture.

If you design your own machine, you can't fuss at people, because you're one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?

She changed the White House from a plastic to a crystal bowl.

'Corduroy pillows: they're making headlines!'

For loveliness Needs not the foreign aid of ornament, But is when unadorned adorned the most.

It would be wonderful if we could just tuck in a few loose ends and change a handful of details of present systems to have them work properly. Unfortunately, we have learned that the GUI concept has fundamental flaws that cannot be corrected by small changes. These flaws have to do with incompatibilities between the designs of both GUIs and command-line interfaces and the way our brains are wired. As we cannot change the way our minds work, we must change the interface design.

I've moved on, grown and learned in the years since then, and am designing interfaces that make the Mac's GUI feel as clumsy to use as the Mac made the old DOS-based systems feel primitive.

You've done a great job decorating the White House.

Sounds cool. Looks cool. Feels cool.

Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity... :-)

That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language.

That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns... :-)

I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.

The way these things go, there are probably 6 or 8 kludgey ways to do it, and a better way that involves rethinking something that hasn't been rethunk yet.

: - cut in regexps I don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking...

Perl did not get where it is by ignoring psychological factors.

There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic.

Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.

Q. Why is this so clumsy? A. The trick is to use Perl's strengths rather than its weaknesses.

I might be able to shoehorn a reference count in on top of the numeric value by disallowing multiple references on scalars with a numeric value, but it wouldn't be as clean. I do occasionally worry about that.

It's the Magic that counts.

If ease of use was the highest goal, we'd all be driving golf carts.

In my own household, for example, an electric refrigerator has been in service for nineteen years, with only a single minor repair: an admirable job. Both automatic refrigerators for daily use and deepfreeze preservation are inventions of permanent value. Though one cannot bestow any such unqualified upon the design of the contemporary motor car, one can hardly doubt that if biotechnic criteria were heeded, rather than those of market analysts and fashion experts, an equally good product might come forth from Detroit, with an equally long prospect of continued use.

If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.

The main reason there are no raw devices [in Linux] is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea.

I chose 1000 originally partly as a way to make sure that people that assumed HZ was 100 would get a swift kick in the pants.

My personal opinion of Mach is not very high. Frankly, it's a piece of crap. It contains all the design mistakes you can make, and even managed to make up a few of its own.

EFI is this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI).

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say 'hey, that _almost_ works for me', and they'll get involved in the project.

'Guess what? Wheels have been round for a really long time, and anybody who 'reinvents' the new wheel is generally considered a crackpot. It turns out that 'round' is simply a good form for a wheel to have. It may be boring, but it just tends to roll better than a square, and 'hipness' has nothing what-so-ever to do with it.'

If we shouldn't do it, we shouldn't be able to do it.

New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p.47)

Any technology tends to create a new human environment... Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike. (1962)

Words were shapes and sounds to him. He saw them, as if he were listening to an unknown language, in shapes.

I was gonna get a candy bar; the button I was supposed to push was 'HH', so I went to the side, I found the 'H' button, I pushed it twice. Fuckin'...potato chips came out man, 'cause they had a 'HH' button, for Christ's sakes! You need to let me know. I'm not familiar with the concept of 'HH'. I did not learn my AA-BB-CC's. God god dammit dammit.'

'Sangamon's Principle,' I said. 'The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide-a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol-nine. Past that, you're talking lots of atoms.' 'So?' 'Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they'll do.'

If you look at the bottom of a Zodiac, it's not just flat. It's got a hint of a keel on it for maneuverability. Not a proper hull though. Hull design is an advanced science. In the days of sail it was as important to national security as aerodynamics are today. A hull was a necessary evil: all that ship down under the water gave you lots of drag, but without it the rest of the ship wouldn't float. Then we invented outboard motors and all that science was made irrelevant by raw power. You could turn a bathtub into a high performance speedboat by bolting a big enough motor on it. When the throttle is high, the impact of the water against the bottom of the hull lifts it right up out of the water. It skims like a skipping rock and who gives a fuck about hydrodynamics. When you throttle it down, the vessel sinks into the water again and wallows like a hog.

We must select a smaller number of standard designs .. and conduct our mass building programs using only these designs over the course of, say, five years .. and if no better designs turn up, then continue in the same way for the next five years.

Nature had no scheme. Only a series of accidents.

First were the thick stone walls, the arches, then the domes and vaults - of the architect, searching out for wider spaces. Now it is concrete-reinforced that gives our imagination flight with its soaring spans and uncommon cantilevers. Concrete, to which architecture is integrated, through which it is able to discard the foregone conclusions of rationalism, with its monotony and repetitious solutions. A concern for beauty, a zest for fantasy, and an ever-present element of surprise bear witness that today's architecture is not a minor craft bound to straight-edge rules, but an architecture imbued with technology: light, creative and unfettered, seeking out its architectural scene.

'To the Egress' (a deceptive sign used to reduce crowding)