Regarding complexity budget, slow software, all that:

Very few people do take pride in building simple, elegant, high-quality systems, do they? Why is that? Why are huge shiny things with tons of features more attractive? 🤔

I never explicitly thought about this, to be honest. It was only at the back of my head. And I never tried to teach our younger “students” at work: “Hey, it’s a great achievement to build something simple and elegant. That’s something to be proud of!”

Worse, simple software is often described as “boring”. Yes, in a way, it is boring, because your brain doesn’t have to get into overdrive to understand it. But that’s exactly the point. And it’s hard to achieve that! Simple software isn’t just “fewer lines of code”, you have to be pretty clever to solve a problem in a simple and elegant way. So it’s something to be proud of.

Could this be an intuitive, emotional way to get more people on board the “simple software”-train? 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Bit like what the suckles folks tried to do right? (Although I never agreed too much with their “ideals” exactly)

@prologic@twtxt.net Kind of, yeah. (I wish they wouldn’t focus so much on “elitism”.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Then there comes in feature creep.

This is driving me nuts. Everybody thinks that “development has to be kept alive!” When people see a project without commits in the last 2 years, they think it’s dead and not worth using. Bah, why? Software can be “done”. If no bugs are known, then there’s no need to change anything.

All these ideas are old. I’ve heard about much of this from meillo some 15 years ago and he didn’t come up with it, either.

It’s all super unpopular. Why? Many of my projects see a burst of commits in the beginning and then mostly just maintenance – and that’s great. It saves me from so much trouble and work. For example, my X11 wallpaper setter was written in 2017, I’m using it daily all the time, it just works, boom, done.

A project isn’t dead if it doesn’t see commits anymore – it’s dead if nobody maintains it anymore.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I couldn’t agree more!I have many projects and tools like this that are just “done”

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Somewhere or another, I think in a William Byrd talk, I heard it suggested that the best ideas in computer science should fit on an index card (ah yes it’s this one: https://paperswelove.org/2017/video/will-byrd-most-beautiful-program/ ). He was referring to the basic principles of LISP/the lambda calculus, which have sometimes been called the Maxwell’s equations of computer programming (by Alan Kay). Simple, short, elegant, but very densely packed with meaning–generations of people have spent their whole careers unpacking what those simple rules can do.

Much of modern software feels like the polar opposite of that. Not only can you not write it on an index card, you never will be able to because people who write software don’t seem to aspire to try. I wish more people thought this way though!

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci straight up in the first minute I was talking he describes basically the concept of being able to describe your idea a 3 x 5 card. I think that’s rather elegant.

I assume not necessarily to fit an entire program in a 3 x 5 card though.