The Pursuit of Simplicity in Programming
Currently, I am writing some documentation and a coding styleguide with a colleague of mine. Whether it’s in our writing or in our coding, we’ve based as many of our decisions as possible on a single concept: minimizing incidental complexity.
In 2011 at Strangeloop, Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure, gave a delightful presentation called Simple Made Easy. In the presentation he discusses the differences between the notion of easy and simple.
This has deeply influenced the vocabulary our team uses in our daily decisions, code critiques and the underlying philosophy that shapes our arguments.
The single value that shapes our programming philosophy is the intentional reduction of incidental complexity because the problems we solve for our companies and customers are already complex enough. We call this the pursuit of radical simplicity.
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it...