"Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011)

As developers, I've come to believe that complexity is the worst sin we commit. Everything we talk about can be traced back to this issue. This is largely due to paying attention to Rich Hickey and learning Clojure. [VIDEO]

"Simple made easy" [0] by Rich Hickey is a must-watch (even if you never touch Clojure) [0] [VIDEO]

loved the take and re-enforcement of a talk I’ve loved forever by Rich Hickey (famous for being integral to the creation of Clojure among other things) called “Simple Made Easy” [VIDEO] Anyone know of any books that dive deeper into the subject?

Also the point of software engineering is to take the real complexity that actually exists and you can't get rid of and work out how to write simple code to deal with it. Good software architecture does not include complexity because there is complexity in the business. It manages the complexity with simple code. The trouble is when people say "complex" you don't really know what they mean, though. They often just mean "difficult". Every programmer who wants to use that word needs to watch this: [VIDEO]

You need to watch this [VIDEO] We should try not to make technical judgements based in flippant things like how few lines can someone not even familiar with the ecosystem get a hello world working

I'm sure most folks here have seen the talk, but Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy # is a superb discussion about this in the context of software. # [VIDEO]

Obligatory Simple Made Easy link: [VIDEO] Simple is a matter of intuition, and that can't be transmitted to others easily, or with a single class or book. At one particular job we got punished by the business for calling things 'easy' when what we mean is that we understand the problem and all of the steps are (mostly) known. Our boss coached the hell out of us to say 'straightforward' when we meant 'understood', instead of using 'easy' as an antonym for 'quagmire' or 'scary'.

Keeping track of all that state in one’s head is hard. I think because of the limitations of FP it’s much easier for new programmers to reason about programs and honestly, learn to program. New developers don’t have to micromanage the computer, the way that the would with an imperative lang. For example, SQL isn’t FP, but think about the number of business analysts whose lives would be more difficult if the had to write imperative programs to fetch data from some sort of data store. I think what in comes down to is simple vs easy. Imperative programming in the very very beginning is easy, buts not simple. Because there’s all this implicit state in your program, as the program grows it becomes very very complex. It’s no longer simple. There’s this really great talk about this idea by rich hickey, the creator of clojure, that dives into this in detail. [VIDEO]