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Einstein himself would approve this philosophy. As he once said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Still, finding the simples
by nfw2 6y ago
Einstein himself would approve this philosophy. As he once said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Still, finding the simplest-possible solution to complex problems is often challenging in itself, especially considering what is "simple" or "intuitive" can be highly subjective. Engineers are often uncomfortable thinking about these problems because the domain is shifted somewhat away from the realm of logic machines and towards psychology and UX, in which they have little to no education or experience.
- Gibbon1 6y agoAn idea I carried over from mechanical engineering is the idea of degrees of freedom. If your solution has fewer degrees of freedom than the problem, it doesn't work. If it has too many it's unconstrained and requires hacks to keep it from doing something terrible.
- devonkim 6y agoThe problem with "simple" is precisely the problem of removing what is not necessary. In most commercial software design, we tend toward making designs so flexible we make them tougher to reason about than necessary. One of the other problems in software is that software that is good is also the code that is easiest to understand and therefore replace. This doesn't happen so much with things like houses evidently.