Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy

This is an excellent presentation of the “soft tech talk” type given by Rich Hickey about the difference between a thing being “easy” in the sense that it is near to our experience and it actually being “simple” in the sense that understanding the idea does not force us to understand a lot of other ideas that are partially folded into it. His point is that we should be careful about the way we use the words “easy” and “simple” and be rather more specific than we tend to be, because this hides up a rather large and common class of complexity problems that we tend to gloss over within programmer society because we are merely familiar with a huge class of unnecessarily complicated constructs that have nothing to do with the business problems we are supposed to be solving.

Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy

If only it were glaringly obvious to us when we were engaging in the glossing-over of non-essential complexity in architecture. I suppose one way of at least trying to become conscious of this is the frequency of use of a certain alarm-bell phrase: “just”. Ward Cunningham’s wiki actually has a whole page on it, along with another page that enumerates and discusses/argues a few other linguistic red flags of note.

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