Simplicity is harder to do than it looks. When you see something simple that actually works, something made to be easy to understand, that can take a lot of wo

Simplicity is harder to do than it looks. When you see something simple that actually works, something made to be easy to understand, that can take a lot of work to arrive at. So while it may not be much to look at, few people can actually accomplish that. Unix is a good example. It looks easy, but when you see people try to improve on something the failure rate is quite high. Let me give you an example of something that used to be clear and trivial in Unix that isn’t anymore because people «improved» it: telling your system about name servers.