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I remember reading a paper a long time ago about traffic engineering. It turns out that when there's a traffic problem you have three choices more or less: 1)
by api 16y ago
I remember reading a paper a long time ago about traffic engineering. It turns out that when there's a traffic problem you have three choices more or less:
1) Add something
2) Change something
3) Remove something
The paper talked about how most civil engineers have a strong bias toward 1, followed by 2, and then rarely 3. The first thought is almost always to add something. Something is wrong? That means we need something more to solve it, right?
Complexity is not a virtue. It's actually a vice and a liability. It is better to solve a problem by removing something than by adding something. This (along with losing sight of what customers want) is the problem with engineer-driven design. Engineers like to add stuff, not remove stuff.
Wave always looked horridly over-complex to me. The protocol was a tower of babel. It was "open," but it was so complex that nobody would bother climbing its learning curve. It tried to solve too many problems at once, it was slow, and it was cumbersome to use. Those are all signs of over-engineering.
- smakz 16y agoVery good points. Reminds me of this quote: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery It does seem to be a major problem with a lot of Google's latest inventions - they try to do too many things at once, and solve too many problems for too many people. Wave as a technology proved to be extremely useful in some certain circles, including corporate collaboration. I would wager if they marketed as a sharepoint competitor and increased the integration with google docs, it could potentially have been a money maker while giving more credibility to Google Docs. Similar situations are going on right now with Google Buzz and even Google Mail, the execution of the "make phone calls from your mail box" seems to leave a lot to be desired. It's a feature that tries to jump out at you and grab your attention as if saying "Hey look at this, we invented something new" when really it should be almost invisible until you need to use it.
- kenjackson 16y ago"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Doesn't this imply that _nothing_ is always perfection. The quote just seems to be flat out wrong. While maybe not as elegant, but wouldn't it be better said as "Perfection is achieved, not where is nothing more to add, but when there is neither more to add nor anything to take away". Maybe the quote has a proceeding sentence that makes it clear.
- barrkel 16y agoThe assumption is that you're talking about some thing - design, work of art, whatever - which is accomplishing some goal. The perfection lies in removing extraneous elements without stopping it from achieving the goal. Nothing, by itself, doesn't achieve much.
- kenjackson 16y agoStill, even your explanation is wrong. There are obviously times when adding something is required. If a car with no engine, I need to add one. I can't simply remove a wheel.
- daleharvey 16y agoas he already said, it has to accomplish some goal, if your goal is for your car to drive, it needs an engine.
- kenjackson 16y agoOK, put a lawnmower engine in a Hummer... Now this simply becomes an exercise in requirements gathering. Because your retort will be the goal is this accerlation curve, this torque curver, this gas mileage, etc.... And this presumes that the requirements lead to perfection. What is the goal of the Mona Lisa or Dante's Inferno? Could Micaelangelo have done less to satisfy the requirements for the Creation of Adam? Can you point to any value in that quote? And let me extend my last question. How many things can you list that would be perfect merely by removing things? I don't think there are many. I suspect most things, that even accomplish a goal, lack perfection due to an array of things, not simply due to having too much of anything.
- tkahn6 16y agohttp://google.com/ http://google.com/ vs http://yahoo.com/ http://yahoo.com/
- sz 16y ago"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" [Einstein] is my favorite quote of all time.
- enjo 16y agoIs that true? In my experience (software) engineers love to rewrite things:)