Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002) writes in “The Tide, Not the Waves”
“In all examples that come to mind the simple and
elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design
and get right, more efficient in execution, and much
more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that
have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability…
Simplicty and elegance are unpopular because they
require hard work and discipline to achieve and
education to be appreciated..
In short, the opportunity to simplify will remain
with us for many years…
We know we have to keep it crisp, disentangled, and
simple if we refuse to be crushed by the complexities
of our own making. But complexity sells better […]
It is time to unmask the computing community as a
Secret Society for the creation and Preservation
of Artificial Complexity.” (p.63)
Source: from “Beyond Calculation. The next fifty years of computing”,
Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe (Editors),
ACM Association of Computing Machinery, 1997
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