4 ms·
no-one told me about this standard when I entered the industry. If it comes from some blog post that I haven't read, how am I meant to know that some small sele
by beaconstudios 8y ago
no-one told me about this standard when I entered the industry. If it comes from some blog post that I haven't read, how am I meant to know that some small selection of developers prefer "simple/easy" as a dichotomy? It's not a correction if it's just a different opinion.
- jstimpfle 8y agoThere is a very popular talk by Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure), "Simple vs easy". Maybe that was what popularized the distinction among many programmers. It's really not an arbitrary definition if you think about it etymologically. Very freely sim-ple is "unfolded" (c.f. pliers, plier qc). Whereas com-plex is "folded together". "Easy" relates more to a state of ignorance. It's about the user of the thing, not about the thing itself. (NB I'm just making this up. I'm not a linguist so I might be wrong).
- beaconstudios 8y agoit makes sense as a distinction and I'll likely use it going forwards. The only thing I objected to was the idea that this distinction is something I should already know as a programmer. I guess it comes down to a case of separate bubbles/backgrounds, as I've never heard the distinction before in my time in industry and I'd guess it's considered standard jargon within your environment?
- jstimpfle 8y agoI would assume most HN folks have heard of Rich Hickey and his talks. Surely not all of them have. Learning never ends :-)
- beaconstudios 8y agoI knew about him, but haven't seen / heard of his talks.