A Quote by Dennis Ritchie

UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.

Dennis Ritchie

Quote Topics

Any Appreciate Coherent Genius Programmer Rate Simple Simplicity Takes Understand UNIX

Quote Author

Dennis Ritchie
American - Scientist
Born: September 9, 1941

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Dennis Ritchie

Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.

E. F. Schumacher

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. [...] It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. [...] You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

Steve Jobs

Any idiot can be complicated. It takes a genius to be simple.

Pete Seeger

All the truly deep people have at the core of their being the genius to be simple or to know how to seek simplicity

Martin E. Marty

Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.

Woody Guthrie

As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.

Frank Lloyd Wright

I just like simplicity. I like simple songs, I like simple chords, simple vocals, simple lead guitar. I just like simplicity. That's just the way I like it.

Jeremy Spencer

The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.

Thomas Merton

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Men of genius are far more abundant than is supposed. In fact, to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius, is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced.

Edgar Allan Poe

Jazz is an art that takes decades to appreciate and understand.

Jake Shimabukuro

The simple person lives the way he breathes, with no more effort or glory, with no more affectation and without shame Simplicity is freedom, buoyancy, transparency. As simple as the air, as free as the air The simple person does not take himself too seriously or too tragicallyHe has nothing to prove, since he has no appearances to keep up, and nothing to seek, since everything is before him. What is more simple than simplicity? What is lighter? It is the virtue of wise men and the wisdom of saints.

Andre Comte-Sponville

UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.

Linus Torvalds

If we have a simple existence, we shall feel how happy and how fortunate we are. There are some people who are of the opinion that simplicity is almost tantamount to stupidity. But simplicity and stupidity are like the North Pole and the South Pole. One can be as simple as a child and, at the same time, one can have boundless knowledge, light and wisdom.