Rich uses a very precise and archaic definition of simplicity, which he describes in his "Simple Made Easy" talk. In a nutshell, when Rich talks about making so

Rich uses a very precise and archaic definition of simplicity, which he describes in his "Simple Made Easy" talk. In a nutshell, when Rich talks about making something simple, he's talking about limiting the number of things that can affect it. For example, under this definition, the simplest thing possible is immutable data, since nothing can affect it. The next simplest things are pure functions, because they're affected only by their arguments. Clojure is a language built around Rich's idea of simplicity, so Clojure prefers data over pure functions, and pure functions over side-effectful functions. What you're describing is what Rich would likely term "easy". Something is easy if you can do it with little effort. Something is simple if few things affect it.