Quotes About Evolution

Empty the pond to get the fish.

The trouble that most of us find with the modern matched sets of clubs is that they don't really seem to know any more about the game than the old ones did.

What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up, And be discharged, and straight wound up anew? No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets: May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.

The only fault's with time; All men become good creatures: but so slow!

Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.

Over the past century and a half, we've gone from harnessing animals—and enduring all the shit they shat—to harnessing the subatomic motion of electrons.

We can say nothing but what hath been said. Our poets steal from Homer…. Our story-dressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best.

Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo.

It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow. This is the essence of iterative and incremental agility. Test-driven development, refactoring, and the clean code they produce make this work at the code level.

It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow. This is the essence of iterative and incremental agility.

1. "First make it work." You are out of business if it doesn't work. 2. "Then make it right." Refactor the code so that you and others can understand it and evolve it as needs change or are better understood. 3. "Then make it fast." Refactor the code for "needed" performance.

Factories are a complexity that can often be avoided, especially in the early phases of an evolving design.

On the other hand, a system being developed by five different teams, each of which includes seven developers, cannot make progress unless the system is divided into well-defined components with reliably stable interfaces. If no other factors are considered, the architecture of that system will likely evolve into five components—one for each team.

Event sourcing is a strategy wherein we store the transactions, but not the state. When state is required, we simply apply all the transactions from the beginning of time.

The component structure cannot be designed from the top down. It is not one of the first things about the system that is designed, but rather evolves as the system grows and changes.

Indeed, most of us realize that the requirements are the most volatile elements in the project.

MacBook is at least 1022 more powerful than those early computers that I started using half a century ago

I used to think 2000 lines was a big program. After all, it was a full box of cards that weighed 10 pounds. Now, however, a program isn't really big until it exceeds 100,000 lines.

If we tried to design the component dependency structure before we designed any classes, we would likely fail rather badly. We would not know much about common closure, we would be unaware of any reusable elements, and we would almost certainly create components that produced dependency cycles. Thus the component dependency structure grows and evolves with the logical design of the system.

highway through the middle of a small town that anticipates growth? Who would want such a road through their town? It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow.

The real point is this: We don't know where to go because we don't know what we are. Do you want to go back to living in a sewer-pipe? And eating other people's garbage? Because that's what rats do. But the fact is, we aren't rats anymore. We are something Dr. Schultz has made. Something new.

eighteen-forties and fifties

The First Decade

Without awareness of common pitfalls such as confirmation bias, positive-outcome bias, and subjective validation, a person trained in logic and fallacy detection is easily deceived into thinking that he or she has acquired invincible armor against assaults of unreason. Expressions like post hoc ergo propter hoc and false cause, should be informed by knowledge of evolution and how the brain works to jump to conclusions about causal connections.