Quotes N+1

Some Quotes I had around and wanted to put somewhere.

Navigation implies state. Software that can be navigated is software in which the user can get lost. The more navigation, the more corners to get stuck in. The more manipulable state, the more ways to wander into a “bad mode.” State is the primary reason people fear computers—stateful things can be broken

Most of the time, a person sits down at her personal computer not to create, but to read, observe, study, explore, make cognitive connections, and ultimately come to an understanding. This person is not seeking to make her mark upon the world, but to rearrange her own neurons. The computer becomes a medium for asking questions, making comparisons, and drawing conclusions—that is, for learning.

Many types of context can be naturally expressed in some informative graphical domain, relieving the user from manipulating information-free general-purpose controls.

If the software properly infers as much as possible from history and the environment, it should be able to produce at least a reasonable starting point for the context model. Most of the user’s interaction will then consist of correcting (or confirming) the software’s predictions. This is generally less stressful than constructing the entire context from scratch.

Simplicity. “I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” C.A.R. Hoare, The Emperor’s Old Clothes Turing Award lecture (1980), p81. From a practical (and historical) standpoint, we can assume that no complex specification will be implemented exactly. This, in itself, is not a problem. However, multiple, decentralized implementations of a complex specification will be incorrect in different ways. A platform consisting of the union of all possible implementations is thus arbitrarily unreliable—the designer can have no assurance of what a recipient actually receives. For a platform to be reliable, it must either have a single implementation, or be so utterly simple that it can be implemented uniformly. If we assume a practical need for open, freely implementable standards, the only option is simplicity.*

All of our days are numbered, we cannot afford to be idle To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all. Because the worth of an idea never becomes apparent until you do it.

—nick cave, 20000 days on earth