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I used to be this way. I used to love complicated designs and read everything I could about complicated technologies. But as I get more experienced and “older”

I used to be this way. I used to love complicated designs and read everything I could about complicated technologies. But as I get more experienced and “older” as a programmer I find complex things just annoying. Me too. I think we're somewhat common. And yet, the analogy isn't working for me. Because there are (too few) people like chneukirchen. I don't know how to fit him into your analogy. How old was he when he created Rack? Too young to be a "master" I think. And yet there it is, a masterpiece of simplicity. In his most recent blog entry wycats said: "...the fuller emphasis on Rack is a strong improvement from the Merb approach." So many smart people worked on both rails and merb, and now Rails 3 is being written around this simple idea resulting in a strong improvement. The key here is just that simplicity is an important value that most of us take too long to acquire. But, clearly, it doesn't have to be that way. I wonder how Christian got it so young.

loup-vaillant 17y ago
You can get the value of simplicity quite young. 2 years ago, with almost no "real world" programming experience, at 25, I already got it. I am no master, mind you. I just had the incredible luck of being taught several styles of programming. My insight about simplicity was then inevitable. Everyone knows that other things being equal, a simpler program is better. What is less known is that, almost every time, simpler means shorter and the other things are equal (at least from a technical perspective). I still face disbelief when I say this.
illumen 17y ago
Rack was built on the design of wsgi, from the python world. So if you didn't know that a lot of the design was copied, I don't think you can give him all that much credit for it as maybe you are. In the README Thanks To section: '* The WSGI team for the well-done and documented work they've done and Rack builds up on.'

loup-vaillant 17y ago

You can get the value of simplicity quite young. 2 years ago, with almost no "real world" programming experience, at 25, I already got it. I am no master, mind you. I just had the incredible luck of being taught several styles of programming. My insight about simplicity was then inevitable. Everyone knows that other things being equal, a simpler program is better. What is less known is that, almost every time, simpler means shorter and the other things are equal (at least from a technical perspective). I still face disbelief when I say this.

illumen 17y ago

Rack was built on the design of wsgi, from the python world. So if you didn't know that a lot of the design was copied, I don't think you can give him all that much credit for it as maybe you are. In the README Thanks To section: '* The WSGI team for the well-done and documented work they've done and Rack builds up on.'