Doomed To Success

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way -- and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

-- Charles Antony Richard Hoare (11 January 1934-), British computer scientist, creator of the Quicksort algorithm, on the programming language PL/1, 1980 Turing Award Lecture; Communications of the ACM 24 (2), February 1981: pp. 75-83