"Simple Made Easy" (2011)
24 points by datboi
24 points by datboi
previously (2comments) previously (2 comments)
maybe this presentation is too uncontroversial to provoke discussion? :-)
(Shameless plug) As much as Hickey is an excellent speaker, I think we can do much better in terms of defining complexity. https://typesanitizer.com/blog/complexity-definitions.html
I enjoyed your meta-analysis the first time and I've enjoyed it this time too. What I want is one that also includes Worse Is Better, as I feel like neither Hickey nor Ousterhout give the New Jersey (or Berkley) approach a fair shake.
Could you be more specific about what comparison you're looking for? Is the distinction you're making that Hickey and Ousterhout focus on simplicity of the interface vs simplicity of the implementation? Or do you mean that Hickey and Ousterhout don't discuss the relative importance of different values but the New Jersey approach specifically assigns a particular ranking?
No, because that would involve writing a whole blog post. 😆 As an example, though: you referenced Hickey's example of parens as both hard and simple. But, I think of JSON as something that's easy, complex, obvious, and explicable. And JSON has fantastic survival characteristics.
IMHO Hickey and Ousterhout do ascribe importance to their sets of values. Hickey is strongly against big balls of mutable state. Ousterhout wants clear dependencies and responsibilities so to make change easy. I strongly suspect neither of them would have signed off on the design the web and browsers as we have them today.
"Simple Made Easy" at this point gets cited a lot as one of the "ancient texts".
It's a bit too easy to actually make whatever you think is good to be simple vs the other thing... but it's still a decent metric to go by!
I think there's a lot of interesting "philosophy of programming" stuff, all locked away in clojure conference videos from 10 years ago at this point. There's definitely an opportunity for some YouTuber or something to kinda replay those greatest hits.