Butler Lampson

In handling resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain an optimum.

There are some basic techniques to control complexity. Fundamentally, I divide and conquer, break things down, and try to write reasonably precise descriptions of what each piece is supposed to do.

Nobody knows how to build really complicated hardware systems, so designing hardware tends to be simpler. Software is much more complicated.

A beautiful program is like a beautiful theorem: It does the job elegantly.

Everything should be made as simple as possible. But to do that you have to master complexity.