9 ms·

Simplistic programming is underrated

96 points by mgdo 9y ago

dang 9y ago
“Mr. William Faulkner got into the act by observing that you never crawl out on a limb. Said you had no courage, never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.” “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. Did you read his last book? It’s all sauce-writing now, but he was good once. Before the sauce, or when he knew how to handle it.” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/26/dictionary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/26/dictionary/
pzone 9y ago
Your apparent mental prowesses will fail to impress those who find it easy to do the same. I have met my share of college students and professors who excel at dropping the name of a few philosophers, at using words only 1% of the population knows about… but, at a certain level, it does nothing for them. People simply roll their eyes and move on… Solid life advice.
- chubot 9y ago
  Since he's a professor, I have no doubt that what he says is true in his environment. On the other hand, it's all relative. After having worked in Silicon Valley for over 15 years, I think the more common mistake is knowing too little philosophy rather than too much. (Of course, I agree that 5 dollar words confuse issues more often than they illuminate them.) It wouldn't hurt a lot of engineers and tech companies to learn more about the past and be more literate. As an example, off the top of my head, here is a concept which comes up a lot in software: "The Map is not the Territory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation Likewise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy You don't have to do statistics / big data for very long before you hit philosophy. It bottoms out pretty quickly, i.e. how do you learn about the world. Likewise programming is about making things, and sometimes about modelling the world, and there are a lot of useful philosophical concepts in that realm too. This is without even getting into the "morals" of technology, which is a big thing in the news lately.
- _tulpa 9y ago
  My pet peeve on HN is people writing comments like they're gonna be peer reviewed. Either the less common words that they use are obviously out of place like someone just discovered a thesaurus (conflated is my favourite example), or it's consistently formal and quasi-academic so I have to put extra effort into reading it. Either way it just makes the authour sound like a pretentions wanker.
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    Yep. "Orthogonal" is one of my favorites. Along with "order of magnitude".
    - sincerely 9y ago
      “order of magnitude” is a pretty useful concept, to be fair.
      - combatentropy 9y ago
        But it's twice as long as saying "ten times." "The server is an order of magnitude faster than our old one." "The server is 10 times faster than our old one." -- More often heard: "The server is an order of magnitude more performant than our legacy server."
    - milesvp 9y ago
      Yeah, except orthogonal has a very precise meaning in mathematics, there is no other word that can be used to replace it when describing a multidimensional vector that is perpendicular to every other vector. This is a very important feature in that it means the vector can be modified and it won't impact any other vectors. You probably hear it a lot, because it's generally important to make functions orthogonal with respect to each other so they may be modified without effecting one another. I'll agree that order of magnitude is starting to feel like it's overused as rhetoric in programming circles, even though it too is a very important concept in engineering.
  - kilburn 9y ago
    As a non-native english speaker trained in academia, I'm pretty sure that sometimes my comments must come out like that. I'm not doing it on purpose, it's just that I don't know better! I suspect there are many others in my situation here, specially those whose native language is of latin origin, because latin-based words are considered more formal/academic in english, yet they're much easier for us to learn! Just keep that in mind when judging other's comments please ;)
dvt 9y ago
> I like the concept of “simplistic programming” by which I mean “programming that is so simple that people will criticize you for it”. At first, that sounds strange… can we really get criticized for being “too simple”? Of course, we do. Oh man, this hits home. I've attempted to be a voice of reason on this front so many times, I've practically given up on it. I've come to the conclusion that most programmers suffer from an intellectual Napoleon complex (which I've seen in academic Philosophy, as well). I've argued for the use of simple "for loops" in lieu of complex map-reduce logic, argued against overly-complex threading logic where threading wasn't necessary, argued against using Spark where the dataset was so tiny, it could be handled by my iPhone. All my suggestions often fall on deaf ears. The counter-argument tends to be some contrived edge-case which (by that point in the discussion), I'm simply too fatigued to argue against. I've lost this war of attrition many (many) times. The irony is that most OSS code tends to be "so simple it's dumb" -- why? Because simple code is easy to contribute to! I think if more professional programmers actually looked at real code outside of their corporate Bitbucket, working as a programmer would be much more enjoyable.
- Y_Y 9y ago
  Is map-reduce really less simple than a for-loop? I agree with your other examples, but I see these too things as totally equivalent (unless you're in a language that make a dog's dinner of this type of thing, like old C++).
  - frankmcsherry 9y ago
    I mean, it can be, right? Take todays Advent of Code problem, where you want to grab the index of the largest element in a sequence breaking ties toward early elements, then re-distribute that element one at a time over other positions starting from the largest element (looping around as required). I can write that using various maps, folds, flat_maps, and reduces, but no one else would understand what is going on in the code. Maybe someone will post the right idiomatic functional way to do that, but nothing elegant comes to mind.
  - dvt 9y ago
    I think so, consider[1]: var r = array.map(x => x*x).reduce((total, num) => total + num, 0); vs its for-loop counterpart: var r = 0.0; for (var j = 0; j < array.length;j++){ var x = array[j]; r += x*x; } Maybe I'm just not as smart as everyone else, but I only have to keep like two things in my mind when looking at the for loop (easy), whereas in the map-reduce case, I need to have a very "holistic" view of what's going on (hard). [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17546450/for-array-is-it-more-efficient-to-use-map-reduce-instead-of-foreach-in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17546450/for-array-is-it...
jmull 9y ago
Sorry for my little pedantic observation: The author wants the word "simple" here, not "simplistic". The reason I even bring it up is that simplistic means overly simple, and that's a real problem in software development in my experience. Overly simple means you aren't actually dealing with significant issues the problem space. If anyone ends up using your simplistic software, they will have to solve the problems you ignore in a non-optimal way. Simplistic -- overly simple -- is the flip-side to overly complex and can cause just as many problems since it pushed extra complications elsewhere. What we'd like is software that is as simple as it can be, but no simpler.
- spenczar5 9y ago
  I think he _does_ mean "simplistic." He means "so simple that people criticize you for it" which lines up with simplistic.
User23 9y ago
There is a major problem with how programmers are judged. Say you are given a seriously challenging and apparently problem; that is to say the naive approaches are all hideous train wrecks. You work on it long and hard, until you have a key insight that allows you to implement the simplest most elegant solution. Now a naive observer will look at it, say well that's obvious, and then ask why you wasted a week to write 40 lines of code.
- sideproject 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
- fpisfun 9y ago
  Anyone who thinks more lines of code equals better software should not be working in this industry. Hopefully the naive observer you're referring to would be someone with no background in software development
  - redblacktree 9y ago
    > someone with no background in software development These people are often management, unfortunately.
- combatentropy 9y ago
  "In science and engineering, some of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself, I could have thought of that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn't you?" --- http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
lou1306 9y ago
I agree that overcomplicating code is bad, but then again, what is "simplistic"? Let's talk Python. To me, using comprehensions is way simpler than loops. Using for i, item in enumerate(my_list): # do some stuff with i and item is way simpler than for i in range(len(my_list)): # do some stuff with i and my_list[i] And still, I bet that most C/Java folks will look at these things with disdain. Also, higher-order functions. They do sound strange, at first. And yet they're a great tool to combine simple pieces of code. I'm starting to think that "elegance" is just the ability to build complex interactions of simple elements. Think chess, or languages like Lisp and Smalltalk, or Euler's identity.
- dizzystar 9y ago
  The first is Pythonic code. I'm guessing the author isn't talking about conventional code, but a more agnostic point of creating complexity for complexity sake, which, unfortunately, is a very common issue. The other way can also be a problem. If you are manually writing out range(len(stuff)) in Python on all your loops, you are writing code that is complicated, overly verbose, difficult to understand, and error-prone.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    Actually I don't think he was successfully making that agnostic point. It's more like: don't gold plate it, and don't use abstractions that you learnt later. Not gold plating things seems obvious. I think there's a TDD advocate who has an example of when he created a wiki that stored its data in a text file. Purely by accident. But it worked perfectly for his use case; he didn't actually need to fire up the latest distributed NoSql blah blah blah. And perhaps that's something worth considering. Not using abstractions learnt later in life tho. I think that's a problem. It took me years of contorting my head to fit in some of the customary Haskell abstractions like monads and functors. Today I probably couldn't describe them accurately, but I'm sure I benefit from when I think in terms of them. For instance, it seems that the code is better if I write a method which accepts an object then does something, vs writing a method which might accept an object, then tests for null, and if not null it does something. (And similarly for looping constructions for instance. You write a more superficial level of code that knows about nulls or arrays and a deeper level of code which doesn't. Directly thinking "monad" literally helps me here.) It's simpler, but it's not at all more simplistic. And so at this point, I want to distinguish between complex/complicated and simple/simplistic. Things which are complicated or simplistic are bad because they're simpler or more complex than they should be. Things which are complex or simple are inevitable and complaining about them is unproductive, like complaining about the weather.
quickthrower2 9y ago
Simple vs. non-simple isn't the best way to think about code. Rather I would think about the requirements of the code. Who is going to be reading it? Maintaining it? Do advanced language features give some kind of advantage (runs faster?, less likely to have bugs?, more extensible?). Will new team members likely introduce bugs? Is spaghettti code better or worse than using less known patterns/language features? Don't use advanced language features in production code for these reasons: (i) impress people or (ii) develop your CV. Don't avoid using advanced language features just because someone wrote a blog post saying it's a bad thing to do. In a nutshell: Think.
- fpisfun 9y ago
  The whole idea of calling functional features advanced language features is a bit ridiculous I think. Yes, something like java only recently started supporting functional programming, but the paradigm has existed for a very long time.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    For me it is how those functional features are used that one needs to be careful of. I like the idea of the code that you read and think "yep that's right", rather than - OK I need half a day and a whiteboard to understand this. However the exact same piece of code might be wrong in one team, and right for another, depending on their experience and backgrounds.
Koshkin 9y ago
"Simplisticity" is in the eyes of the beholder. (Many serious programmers see the C++ template language as overly simplistic.)
lhnz 9y ago
I've been thinking about this lately, too. I strongly believe this, to the extent that I have a preference for code which is simple but incorrect over complicated but correct. Obviously simple and correct is best, but if I can't get that (at least in the short-term) I would sacrifice correctness for simplicity. You can often incrementally improve a simple solution, but it is very difficult to simplify a complicated solution.
- combatentropy 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
hbt 9y ago
The blog post barely gets into the idea of what simplicity means in programming. If you have any interest in the topic, I recommend Rich Hickey talk "Simplicity matters" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 My personal favorite is: Living with complexity 2010 by Don Norman (Author of Design of everyday things) https://www.amazon.ca/Living-Complexity-Donald-Norman/dp/0262014866 https://www.amazon.ca/Living-Complexity-Donald-Norman/dp/026...
samiralajmovic 9y ago
Discarding previous knowledge where it is applicable and simpler is obviously unwarranted. Similarly to how we utilize Newtons laws within a lower energy and mass range, we should prefer the simpler equations where they make sense. However, I'm not sure that a for loop is actually simpler than map reduce as it depends on the context. Who is reading your code? How complex is the code inside the for loop? What kind of problem are you solving? The vocabulary associated with functional programming is better equipped to handle mathematical expressions than imperative code and in this case, simpler. In essence; adding complexity for the sake of complexity or to come of as intelligent is bad...
AceJohnny2 9y ago
I really liked this, because it resonates with my approach. I think I first realized the basics of this some time in college. As a teenager around '96 I discovered IRC, and hung around chatrooms being, well, a teenager. I discovered smileys, & how 2 use abbrevs to pack more in < chars. Also 1337speek... Only a few years later did I realize that what was more impressive was being able to (just as quickly) form clear complete sentences. Also related, Pascal's comment in a quickly-written letter to a friend: "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." Also related, Kernighan's quote on debugging: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" Ultimately, I must admit that I still try to show off in my work and presentation, but I have learned that a work that is beautiful by its simplicity and humility has way more staying power than a complicated and sophisticated one ;)
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  > Only a few years later did I realize that what was more impressive was being able to (just as quickly) form clear complete sentences. What's even more impressive still is knowing when to use which rather than locking yourself into a prescriptivist hole.
agentultra 9y ago
First, you're not stupid/dumb/whatever. This idea of simplistic programming obfuscates the reality that the enterprise of software programming is one of the most complex endeavors humans have undertook. We desire simplicity because the reality is terrifying: that programming is far too complex for us to manage. That we're not smart enough to keep up. If we keep on using simple tools this reality will only continue to get uglier. When I first started programming it was all PEEK, POKE, GOTO 10. Life was simple. Single processor, some registers, main memory, and an incredibly slow disk drive. Mastery could be achieved with a book and a few weeks off in the summer. Since then I've worked on Mozilla, Linux, Openstack... I've written interpreters and JIT compilers, graphics engines, REST APIs, databases, eventually consisted distributed programming systems... it has only exploded in complexity. A modern computer is a microscopic distributed system. There are no less than four cores in most computers. Several hierarchies of caches. Multiple channels between cores, main memory, and other buses. There's a clock in there that's probably wrong and an application that is running and coordinating over the terribly slow network with other processes running on other computers... it's a bit much to take in. And yet we manage to ship software constantly. We can do that because of abstractions. Some abstractions are harder to understand than others. Some are made up by other programmers and given strange names and come loaded with a bunch of jargon. Others borrow theirs from existing literature like, say, mathematics. I think more programmers are becoming interested in functional programming techniques and are learning to get over the hump of learning them because they care deeply about reliability, correctness, and expressiveness and they still want to write quick, simple programs. You can write 4M lines of carefully crafted C and hope you didn't miss a case or off-by-one error. And that you wrote the logic correctly. Or you could write 30k lines of Haskell and know that only errors in the logic will be present at most. And with a little more effort you might even be able to encode your propositions in your types and cover your bases there too. It might come with a lot of jargon and seemingly-impenetrable concepts but it's worth learning.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
RickJWag 9y ago
Nice article. Code is written for the maintenance programmer to understand. Simple is better.
fuball63 9y ago
I think the sentiment is also true for devops/infrastructure. I like to use the term "minimalistic" instead of simple, because I think some people associate simple with naive and slapshod.
- combatentropy 9y ago
  I like minimalism too, but people associate that with laziness. You can't win!
zamalek 9y ago
I don't think it's underrated; it's that it's hard to write. You almost go full-circle. You start off writing highly procedural code (with too much branching), join the GOF-all-the-things religion and eventually revert to highly procedural code (more specifically "algorithmic code" or "functional code"). As an example, many years ago I wrote a dependency resolver. It needed to find cycles (as we had some rules that could resolve those cycles) in order to make changes in the correct order. At the time I was a junior developer in that problem space. My solution consisted of an O(scary) algorithm; consisting of classes, patterns and all the good things that make your code "simple" and "understandable" (it was not). Customers eventually threw graphs with a few million edges at it and we needed a new solution. I have no idea how I happened upon Tarjan's Strongly Connected Components Algorithm but some hundreds of lines of code was replaced with dozens. Minutes turned into milliseconds. Here's the thing about simplicity: even though the code was simple, even I (as the author) didn't understand it at the time - I trusted the guy with the PHD. Many years later I finally understand how it works. It is an incredible masterwork of simplicity but as it turns out something that is simple is not always understandable. Simplicity probably has a simple definition in the dictionary, but in practice it can be quite complex to make something simple. So you can't just say "make your code simple" because it's really hard to do that.
- hyperion2010 9y ago
  Simplicity is the answer without the question.
- lestertj 9y ago
  I agree. There seems to be two interpretations of "simple" - simple in being concise like that of a beautiful mathematical equation, or simple in being easy to follow and understand. I assume the latter is preferable when factoring in having other pairs of eyes reading/maintaining your code, especially since the latter does not always imply less efficient code
  - etherealG 9y ago
    Actually, I think the interpretation of simplicity as ease is an awful thing in the context of programming and should be actively discouraged. Rich Hickey’s talk “simple made easy” is the best explanation I’ve ever seen of this.
mnm1 9y ago
"If you can write a program using nothing but the simplest syntax, it is a net win." In other words, write everything in Brainfuck FTW? Seriously?
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  That's not simple. It's a very minimalistic syntax, but it is definitely not simple.
bryanrasmussen 9y ago
I think we teach Newton's 3 laws because they are largely correct.
ld00d 9y ago
I've been working on a project lately that was designed by a really smart guy. It follows the OOP patterns and IoC and all of that. Trouble is you can introduce such complexity that maintenance from someone a few years later can get incredibly difficult. A lot of this code I'm working in has implicit dependencies that are really hard to trace w/o stepping through line by line. If the code was more explicit, maybe it would offend the ideologists, and maybe it wouldn't be as flexible as it is (debateable), but it sure as hell would be easier to maintain.
scelerat 9y ago
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." It sounds like the author is conflating sophistication with complexity. In my experience, "simplistic" programming leads to greater complexity. It is the very sophistication and use of more advanced programming and structural patterns he rails against that in fact enables concise, maintainable code.
idooontcare 9y ago
Kiss rules are good for lifestyle and everything!
catnaroek 9y ago
Can these experts advocating “simplicity” offer a concrete way to measure it?
luord 9y ago
Good thing I have zero interest in functional programming and other cyclical fads. I just concern myself with keeping my code understandable, maintainable (with the help of my teams) and tested.

96 points by mgdo 9y ago

dang 9y ago

“Mr. William Faulkner got into the act by observing that you never crawl out on a limb. Said you had no courage, never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.” “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. Did you read his last book? It’s all sauce-writing now, but he was good once. Before the sauce, or when he knew how to handle it.” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/26/dictionary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/26/dictionary/

pzone 9y ago

Your apparent mental prowesses will fail to impress those who find it easy to do the same. I have met my share of college students and professors who excel at dropping the name of a few philosophers, at using words only 1% of the population knows about… but, at a certain level, it does nothing for them. People simply roll their eyes and move on… Solid life advice.

chubot 9y ago
Since he's a professor, I have no doubt that what he says is true in his environment. On the other hand, it's all relative. After having worked in Silicon Valley for over 15 years, I think the more common mistake is knowing too little philosophy rather than too much. (Of course, I agree that 5 dollar words confuse issues more often than they illuminate them.) It wouldn't hurt a lot of engineers and tech companies to learn more about the past and be more literate. As an example, off the top of my head, here is a concept which comes up a lot in software: "The Map is not the Territory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation Likewise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy You don't have to do statistics / big data for very long before you hit philosophy. It bottoms out pretty quickly, i.e. how do you learn about the world. Likewise programming is about making things, and sometimes about modelling the world, and there are a lot of useful philosophical concepts in that realm too. This is without even getting into the "morals" of technology, which is a big thing in the news lately.
_tulpa 9y ago
My pet peeve on HN is people writing comments like they're gonna be peer reviewed. Either the less common words that they use are obviously out of place like someone just discovered a thesaurus (conflated is my favourite example), or it's consistently formal and quasi-academic so I have to put extra effort into reading it. Either way it just makes the authour sound like a pretentions wanker.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  Yep. "Orthogonal" is one of my favorites. Along with "order of magnitude".
  - sincerely 9y ago
    “order of magnitude” is a pretty useful concept, to be fair.
    - combatentropy 9y ago
      But it's twice as long as saying "ten times." "The server is an order of magnitude faster than our old one." "The server is 10 times faster than our old one." -- More often heard: "The server is an order of magnitude more performant than our legacy server."
  - milesvp 9y ago
    Yeah, except orthogonal has a very precise meaning in mathematics, there is no other word that can be used to replace it when describing a multidimensional vector that is perpendicular to every other vector. This is a very important feature in that it means the vector can be modified and it won't impact any other vectors. You probably hear it a lot, because it's generally important to make functions orthogonal with respect to each other so they may be modified without effecting one another. I'll agree that order of magnitude is starting to feel like it's overused as rhetoric in programming circles, even though it too is a very important concept in engineering.
- kilburn 9y ago
  As a non-native english speaker trained in academia, I'm pretty sure that sometimes my comments must come out like that. I'm not doing it on purpose, it's just that I don't know better! I suspect there are many others in my situation here, specially those whose native language is of latin origin, because latin-based words are considered more formal/academic in english, yet they're much easier for us to learn! Just keep that in mind when judging other's comments please ;)

dvt 9y ago

> I like the concept of “simplistic programming” by which I mean “programming that is so simple that people will criticize you for it”. At first, that sounds strange… can we really get criticized for being “too simple”? Of course, we do. Oh man, this hits home. I've attempted to be a voice of reason on this front so many times, I've practically given up on it. I've come to the conclusion that most programmers suffer from an intellectual Napoleon complex (which I've seen in academic Philosophy, as well). I've argued for the use of simple "for loops" in lieu of complex map-reduce logic, argued against overly-complex threading logic where threading wasn't necessary, argued against using Spark where the dataset was so tiny, it could be handled by my iPhone. All my suggestions often fall on deaf ears. The counter-argument tends to be some contrived edge-case which (by that point in the discussion), I'm simply too fatigued to argue against. I've lost this war of attrition many (many) times. The irony is that most OSS code tends to be "so simple it's dumb" -- why? Because simple code is easy to contribute to! I think if more professional programmers actually looked at real code outside of their corporate Bitbucket, working as a programmer would be much more enjoyable.

Y_Y 9y ago
Is map-reduce really less simple than a for-loop? I agree with your other examples, but I see these too things as totally equivalent (unless you're in a language that make a dog's dinner of this type of thing, like old C++).
- frankmcsherry 9y ago
  I mean, it can be, right? Take todays Advent of Code problem, where you want to grab the index of the largest element in a sequence breaking ties toward early elements, then re-distribute that element one at a time over other positions starting from the largest element (looping around as required). I can write that using various maps, folds, flat_maps, and reduces, but no one else would understand what is going on in the code. Maybe someone will post the right idiomatic functional way to do that, but nothing elegant comes to mind.
- dvt 9y ago
  I think so, consider[1]: var r = array.map(x => x*x).reduce((total, num) => total + num, 0); vs its for-loop counterpart: var r = 0.0; for (var j = 0; j < array.length;j++){ var x = array[j]; r += x*x; } Maybe I'm just not as smart as everyone else, but I only have to keep like two things in my mind when looking at the for loop (easy), whereas in the map-reduce case, I need to have a very "holistic" view of what's going on (hard). [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17546450/for-array-is-it-more-efficient-to-use-map-reduce-instead-of-foreach-in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17546450/for-array-is-it...

jmull 9y ago

Sorry for my little pedantic observation: The author wants the word "simple" here, not "simplistic". The reason I even bring it up is that simplistic means overly simple, and that's a real problem in software development in my experience. Overly simple means you aren't actually dealing with significant issues the problem space. If anyone ends up using your simplistic software, they will have to solve the problems you ignore in a non-optimal way. Simplistic -- overly simple -- is the flip-side to overly complex and can cause just as many problems since it pushed extra complications elsewhere. What we'd like is software that is as simple as it can be, but no simpler.

spenczar5 9y ago
I think he _does_ mean "simplistic." He means "so simple that people criticize you for it" which lines up with simplistic.

User23 9y ago

There is a major problem with how programmers are judged. Say you are given a seriously challenging and apparently problem; that is to say the naive approaches are all hideous train wrecks. You work on it long and hard, until you have a key insight that allows you to implement the simplest most elegant solution. Now a naive observer will look at it, say well that's obvious, and then ask why you wasted a week to write 40 lines of code.

sideproject 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
fpisfun 9y ago
Anyone who thinks more lines of code equals better software should not be working in this industry. Hopefully the naive observer you're referring to would be someone with no background in software development
- redblacktree 9y ago
  > someone with no background in software development These people are often management, unfortunately.
combatentropy 9y ago
"In science and engineering, some of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself, I could have thought of that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn't you?" --- http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

lou1306 9y ago

I agree that overcomplicating code is bad, but then again, what is "simplistic"? Let's talk Python. To me, using comprehensions is way simpler than loops. Using for i, item in enumerate(my_list): # do some stuff with i and item is way simpler than for i in range(len(my_list)): # do some stuff with i and my_list[i] And still, I bet that most C/Java folks will look at these things with disdain. Also, higher-order functions. They do sound strange, at first. And yet they're a great tool to combine simple pieces of code. I'm starting to think that "elegance" is just the ability to build complex interactions of simple elements. Think chess, or languages like Lisp and Smalltalk, or Euler's identity.

dizzystar 9y ago
The first is Pythonic code. I'm guessing the author isn't talking about conventional code, but a more agnostic point of creating complexity for complexity sake, which, unfortunately, is a very common issue. The other way can also be a problem. If you are manually writing out range(len(stuff)) in Python on all your loops, you are writing code that is complicated, overly verbose, difficult to understand, and error-prone.
- squiggleblaz 9y ago
  Actually I don't think he was successfully making that agnostic point. It's more like: don't gold plate it, and don't use abstractions that you learnt later. Not gold plating things seems obvious. I think there's a TDD advocate who has an example of when he created a wiki that stored its data in a text file. Purely by accident. But it worked perfectly for his use case; he didn't actually need to fire up the latest distributed NoSql blah blah blah. And perhaps that's something worth considering. Not using abstractions learnt later in life tho. I think that's a problem. It took me years of contorting my head to fit in some of the customary Haskell abstractions like monads and functors. Today I probably couldn't describe them accurately, but I'm sure I benefit from when I think in terms of them. For instance, it seems that the code is better if I write a method which accepts an object then does something, vs writing a method which might accept an object, then tests for null, and if not null it does something. (And similarly for looping constructions for instance. You write a more superficial level of code that knows about nulls or arrays and a deeper level of code which doesn't. Directly thinking "monad" literally helps me here.) It's simpler, but it's not at all more simplistic. And so at this point, I want to distinguish between complex/complicated and simple/simplistic. Things which are complicated or simplistic are bad because they're simpler or more complex than they should be. Things which are complex or simple are inevitable and complaining about them is unproductive, like complaining about the weather.

quickthrower2 9y ago

Simple vs. non-simple isn't the best way to think about code. Rather I would think about the requirements of the code. Who is going to be reading it? Maintaining it? Do advanced language features give some kind of advantage (runs faster?, less likely to have bugs?, more extensible?). Will new team members likely introduce bugs? Is spaghettti code better or worse than using less known patterns/language features? Don't use advanced language features in production code for these reasons: (i) impress people or (ii) develop your CV. Don't avoid using advanced language features just because someone wrote a blog post saying it's a bad thing to do. In a nutshell: Think.

fpisfun 9y ago
The whole idea of calling functional features advanced language features is a bit ridiculous I think. Yes, something like java only recently started supporting functional programming, but the paradigm has existed for a very long time.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  For me it is how those functional features are used that one needs to be careful of. I like the idea of the code that you read and think "yep that's right", rather than - OK I need half a day and a whiteboard to understand this. However the exact same piece of code might be wrong in one team, and right for another, depending on their experience and backgrounds.

Koshkin 9y ago

"Simplisticity" is in the eyes of the beholder. (Many serious programmers see the C++ template language as overly simplistic.)

lhnz 9y ago

I've been thinking about this lately, too. I strongly believe this, to the extent that I have a preference for code which is simple but incorrect over complicated but correct. Obviously simple and correct is best, but if I can't get that (at least in the short-term) I would sacrifice correctness for simplicity. You can often incrementally improve a simple solution, but it is very difficult to simplify a complicated solution.

combatentropy 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

hbt 9y ago

The blog post barely gets into the idea of what simplicity means in programming. If you have any interest in the topic, I recommend Rich Hickey talk "Simplicity matters" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 My personal favorite is: Living with complexity 2010 by Don Norman (Author of Design of everyday things) https://www.amazon.ca/Living-Complexity-Donald-Norman/dp/0262014866 https://www.amazon.ca/Living-Complexity-Donald-Norman/dp/026...

samiralajmovic 9y ago

Discarding previous knowledge where it is applicable and simpler is obviously unwarranted. Similarly to how we utilize Newtons laws within a lower energy and mass range, we should prefer the simpler equations where they make sense. However, I'm not sure that a for loop is actually simpler than map reduce as it depends on the context. Who is reading your code? How complex is the code inside the for loop? What kind of problem are you solving? The vocabulary associated with functional programming is better equipped to handle mathematical expressions than imperative code and in this case, simpler. In essence; adding complexity for the sake of complexity or to come of as intelligent is bad...

AceJohnny2 9y ago

I really liked this, because it resonates with my approach. I think I first realized the basics of this some time in college. As a teenager around '96 I discovered IRC, and hung around chatrooms being, well, a teenager. I discovered smileys, & how 2 use abbrevs to pack more in < chars. Also 1337speek... Only a few years later did I realize that what was more impressive was being able to (just as quickly) form clear complete sentences. Also related, Pascal's comment in a quickly-written letter to a friend: "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." Also related, Kernighan's quote on debugging: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" Ultimately, I must admit that I still try to show off in my work and presentation, but I have learned that a work that is beautiful by its simplicity and humility has way more staying power than a complicated and sophisticated one ;)

zimpenfish 9y ago
> Only a few years later did I realize that what was more impressive was being able to (just as quickly) form clear complete sentences. What's even more impressive still is knowing when to use which rather than locking yourself into a prescriptivist hole.

agentultra 9y ago

First, you're not stupid/dumb/whatever. This idea of simplistic programming obfuscates the reality that the enterprise of software programming is one of the most complex endeavors humans have undertook. We desire simplicity because the reality is terrifying: that programming is far too complex for us to manage. That we're not smart enough to keep up. If we keep on using simple tools this reality will only continue to get uglier. When I first started programming it was all PEEK, POKE, GOTO 10. Life was simple. Single processor, some registers, main memory, and an incredibly slow disk drive. Mastery could be achieved with a book and a few weeks off in the summer. Since then I've worked on Mozilla, Linux, Openstack... I've written interpreters and JIT compilers, graphics engines, REST APIs, databases, eventually consisted distributed programming systems... it has only exploded in complexity. A modern computer is a microscopic distributed system. There are no less than four cores in most computers. Several hierarchies of caches. Multiple channels between cores, main memory, and other buses. There's a clock in there that's probably wrong and an application that is running and coordinating over the terribly slow network with other processes running on other computers... it's a bit much to take in. And yet we manage to ship software constantly. We can do that because of abstractions. Some abstractions are harder to understand than others. Some are made up by other programmers and given strange names and come loaded with a bunch of jargon. Others borrow theirs from existing literature like, say, mathematics. I think more programmers are becoming interested in functional programming techniques and are learning to get over the hump of learning them because they care deeply about reliability, correctness, and expressiveness and they still want to write quick, simple programs. You can write 4M lines of carefully crafted C and hope you didn't miss a case or off-by-one error. And that you wrote the logic correctly. Or you could write 30k lines of Haskell and know that only errors in the logic will be present at most. And with a little more effort you might even be able to encode your propositions in your types and cover your bases there too. It might come with a lot of jargon and seemingly-impenetrable concepts but it's worth learning.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

RickJWag 9y ago

Nice article. Code is written for the maintenance programmer to understand. Simple is better.

fuball63 9y ago

I think the sentiment is also true for devops/infrastructure. I like to use the term "minimalistic" instead of simple, because I think some people associate simple with naive and slapshod.

combatentropy 9y ago
I like minimalism too, but people associate that with laziness. You can't win!

zamalek 9y ago

I don't think it's underrated; it's that it's hard to write. You almost go full-circle. You start off writing highly procedural code (with too much branching), join the GOF-all-the-things religion and eventually revert to highly procedural code (more specifically "algorithmic code" or "functional code"). As an example, many years ago I wrote a dependency resolver. It needed to find cycles (as we had some rules that could resolve those cycles) in order to make changes in the correct order. At the time I was a junior developer in that problem space. My solution consisted of an O(scary) algorithm; consisting of classes, patterns and all the good things that make your code "simple" and "understandable" (it was not). Customers eventually threw graphs with a few million edges at it and we needed a new solution. I have no idea how I happened upon Tarjan's Strongly Connected Components Algorithm but some hundreds of lines of code was replaced with dozens. Minutes turned into milliseconds. Here's the thing about simplicity: even though the code was simple, even I (as the author) didn't understand it at the time - I trusted the guy with the PHD. Many years later I finally understand how it works. It is an incredible masterwork of simplicity but as it turns out something that is simple is not always understandable. Simplicity probably has a simple definition in the dictionary, but in practice it can be quite complex to make something simple. So you can't just say "make your code simple" because it's really hard to do that.

hyperion2010 9y ago
Simplicity is the answer without the question.
lestertj 9y ago
I agree. There seems to be two interpretations of "simple" - simple in being concise like that of a beautiful mathematical equation, or simple in being easy to follow and understand. I assume the latter is preferable when factoring in having other pairs of eyes reading/maintaining your code, especially since the latter does not always imply less efficient code
- etherealG 9y ago
  Actually, I think the interpretation of simplicity as ease is an awful thing in the context of programming and should be actively discouraged. Rich Hickey’s talk “simple made easy” is the best explanation I’ve ever seen of this.

mnm1 9y ago

"If you can write a program using nothing but the simplest syntax, it is a net win." In other words, write everything in Brainfuck FTW? Seriously?

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
That's not simple. It's a very minimalistic syntax, but it is definitely not simple.

bryanrasmussen 9y ago

I think we teach Newton's 3 laws because they are largely correct.

ld00d 9y ago

I've been working on a project lately that was designed by a really smart guy. It follows the OOP patterns and IoC and all of that. Trouble is you can introduce such complexity that maintenance from someone a few years later can get incredibly difficult. A lot of this code I'm working in has implicit dependencies that are really hard to trace w/o stepping through line by line. If the code was more explicit, maybe it would offend the ideologists, and maybe it wouldn't be as flexible as it is (debateable), but it sure as hell would be easier to maintain.

scelerat 9y ago

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." It sounds like the author is conflating sophistication with complexity. In my experience, "simplistic" programming leads to greater complexity. It is the very sophistication and use of more advanced programming and structural patterns he rails against that in fact enables concise, maintainable code.

idooontcare 9y ago

Kiss rules are good for lifestyle and everything!

catnaroek 9y ago

Can these experts advocating “simplicity” offer a concrete way to measure it?

luord 9y ago

Good thing I have zero interest in functional programming and other cyclical fads. I just concern myself with keeping my code understandable, maintainable (with the help of my teams) and tested.