Programming for the lowest common denominator? Something about that sounds wrong. No, that's almost exactly right. In my experience designing, building, inher

Programming for the lowest common denominator? Something about that sounds wrong. No, that's almost exactly right. In my experience designing, building, inheriting, and maintaining systems that in some cases predate the dotcom boom, and in others need to run invisibly for just as long into the future, it's the simplest design that's the best design (but, as they say, no simpler). I'm not talking about avoiding useful language features because nobody wants to learn them. I'm talking about the structure of the system itself. Minimize layers, minimize context, keep things as linear as possible. Don't use polymorphism just because you can, don't use functional tricks that obscure rather than enlighten the flow, don't make version zero an SOA, etc.