A Philosophy of Software Design

by John Ousterhout

the greatest limitation in writing software is our ability to understand the systems we are creating.

The ability to recognize complexity is a crucial design skill. It allows you to identify problems before you invest a lot of effort in them, and it allows you to make good choices among alternatives.

The tactical tornado is a prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado.

By programming tactically you are borrowing time from the future: development will go more quickly now, but more slowly later

I have noticed that the design-it-twice principle is sometimes hard for really smart people to embrace. When they are growing up, smart people discover that their first quick idea about any problem is sufficient for a good grade; there is no need to consider a second or third possibility. This tends to result in bad work habits. However, as these people get older, they get promoted into environments with harder and harder problems. Eventually, everyone reaches a point where your first ideas are no longer good enough; if you want to get really great results, you have to consider a second possibility, or perhaps a third, no matter how smart you are. The design of large software systems falls in this category: no-one is good enough to get it right with their first try.