Alan Turing — "Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend …"
Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.
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More from Alan Turing
"The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize that it is a very complex machine."
"May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?"
"We are not interested in the fact that a machine can do something, but in the fact that it can learn to do something."
"The problems of biology can be reduced to physics and chemistry."
"The machine has to be able to do something which it has never been programmed to do."
Details
Within collected quotes, exact original source not specified but widely attributed.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
A pragmatic argument against over-engineering: spending excessive time eliminating every flaw yields diminishing returns. At some threshold, a working system with minor bugs delivers more value than a theoretically perfect system never shipped. The real cost of chasing zero defects often exceeds the cost of the defects themselves. Accepting tolerable imperfections allows functional work to move forward rather than stall indefinitely in pursuit of an unreachable ideal.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing built the Bombe codebreaking machine at Bletchley Park under wartime urgency — perfectionism could cost lives. Designing early computers like the ACE and Manchester Mark 1, he favored iterative, empirical methods over exhaustive pre-design. His Turing Test similarly embraced practical uncertainty: a working behavioral test beats an unanswerable philosophical definition. Incompleteness was foundational to his mathematics, deeply shaped by Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
The era
The 1940s–50s saw computing built from scratch with vacuum tubes, relay switches, and paper tape — hardware failures were routine. Wartime codebreaking demanded speed over perfection; delays cost intelligence. Post-war, the discipline of debugging was itself new — Grace Hopper famously logged a literal moth caught in a relay in 1947. Iterative progress on imperfect machines mattered far more than waiting for flawless theoretical designs.
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