simplicity

• If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.

  — Bill Gates

• Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.

  — Immanuel Kant

• Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.

  — Erik Naggum

• The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.

  — Bill Gates

• Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. … Simplify, simplify.

  — Henry David Thoreau

• 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

• Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

  — Ward Cunningham

• To worry about tomorrow is to detract from your work today. Time you spend thinking about tomorrow is time you're not spending thinking about what to do today.

  — Ward Cunningham

• An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity.

  — Terry A. Davis

• In Constructions that are equally Geometrical, the most simple are always to be preferr'd. This Law is so universal as to be without Exception. But Algebraick Expressions add nothing to the Simplicity of the Construction

  — Isaac Newton

• Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

  — Fred Brooks

• It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!

  — Robert C. Martin

• Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

  — Agile Manifesto signatories

• How to make a list? Collecting the data, that's the easy bit. Sorting it into categories is slightly more difficult. Shortening the list is the most difficult part. That a really difficult problem.

  — Joe Armstrong

• High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks—chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.

  — Edward Abbey

• The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

  — Freeman Dyson

• 31: Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

  — Alan Perlis

• A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds.

  — Ted Nelson

• It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

  — Albert Einstein