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“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” - Dij

• rotifer 4y ago
  That quote comes from here [1]. A few lines later, writing about a talk he had given at a software company, he says: I gave a beautiful lecture, which fell flat on its face. The managers were horrified at the suggestion that flawless software should be delivered since company derived its stability from the subsequent maintenance contracts. The programmers were horrified too: they derived their intellectual excitement from not quite understanding what they were doing and their professional satisfaction from finding weird bugs they had first introduced in their daring irresponsibility. Teaching the competence to program boils down to the training of misfits. Ouch. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1041.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • jgerrish 4y ago
    > Teaching the competence to program boils down to the training of misfits. Haha. Ohh geez, herding cats. Of course, the joke is I can have the most consistent, predictable engineer ever. He gives me a constant stream of ones. Always passes the test. But I don't even know what Zero means. Anyways, in the real world I've just had a major issue dumped in my lap and I just need to stop the fucking bleeding in a complex system.