Simple made easy

1 minute

Precise words make communication more efficient. Arguably, software development is about managing conceptual complexity. Simple made easy, by Rich Hickey is a talk that tackles those two topics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSwPOpOKr3w
Two takeaways from this talk:

  • The differences between simple and easy.
    • Simplicity is an objective measure, and its units are the level of interleaving (of concepts). Simplicity should not be measured by the cardinality, the number of concepts/units.
    • Easiness is a subjective measure, and it is related to how familiar you are with some topic or your past experience.
  • We can make things simple with the tools we already have by favoring concepts that make things simpler to reason about, not quicker to write. He recommends:

See also:


Comments

3 responses to “Simple made easy”

  1. […] I am not always able to write code as a series of mathematical transformations, but I find pleasure when I do: it is much easier to conceptually proof whether the code is correct. I also like how the code embodied some of the ideas I’m more interested in lately, such as how a better vocabulary helps you to make things simpler. […]

  2. […] burden and a bless, and we need to understand them and learn how to use them to write code that is simple. In the next post, we shall talk about one of the tricks that we have: immutable data […]

  3. […] restating the problem in a more simple language, the structure is made more evident. We are free of the biases that code as a language […]

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