complexity

• Joe's law: Frameworks grow in complexity until nobody can use them.

  — Joe Armstrong

• The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

  — Thomas Henry Huxley

• We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

  — Stephen Jay Gould

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

  — Larry Wall

• The recycling of resource by the aggregate behavior of a diverse array of agents is much more than the sum of the individual actions.

  — John Henry Holland

• I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

  — Jaron Lanier

• To me it is not in the least demeaning that consciousness and intelligence are the result of “mere” matter sufficiently complexly arranged; on the contrary, it is an exalting tribute to the subtlety of matter and the laws of Nature.

  — Carl Sagan

• I believe that no one who is familiar, either with mathematical advances in other fields, or with the range of special biological conditions to be considered, would ever conceive that everything could be summed up in a single mathematical formula, however complex.

  — Ronald Fisher

• The classification of a system as complex or simple will depend upon the observer of the system and upon the purpose he has for considering the system.

  — Mike Jackson

• All experience has taught us that solving a complex problem uncovers hidden assumptions and ever more knowledge, trade-offs that we didn't anticipate but which can make the difference between meeting a deadline and going into research mode for a year, etc.

  — Erik Naggum

• If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

  — Jaron Lanier

• If you try to improve the performance of a system of people, machines, and procedures by setting numerical goals for the improvement of individual parts of the system, the system will defeat your efforts and you will pay a price where you least expect it.

  — Myron Tribus

• Biological systems are dynamical, not easily predicted, and are creative in many ways... In the old equilibrium worldview, ideas about change were dominated by the action-reaction formula. It was a clockwork world, ultimately predictable in boring ways.

  — Christopher Langton

• The failures of previous civilizations, and the crises existing for our own, show that man has not evolved the ability to cope with limitless complication.

  — Charles Lindbergh

• [T]he best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same cat.

  — Norbert Wiener

• Even though these complex systems differ in detail, the question of coherence under change is the central enigma for each.

  — John Henry Holland

• 'System' is the concept that refers both to a complex of interdependencies between parts, components, and processes, that involves discernible regularities of relationships, and to a similar type of interdependency between such a complex and its surrounding environment.

  — Talcott Parsons

• Variety can destroy variety.

  — W. Ross Ashby

• So what is reality, one more time? An incompressible computation by a fractal CA of inconceivable dimensions. And where is this huge computation taking place? Everywhere; it’s what we’re made of.

  — Rudy Rucker