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Welcome to the club! The fundamental problem of simplifying software is humans. Just consider date formats, time zones, and tax codes. Humans love to make comp

Welcome to the club! The fundamental problem of simplifying software is humans. Just consider date formats, time zones, and tax codes. Humans love to make complicated things. My philosophy on this has been to take the complex human stuff and stick it in a black box. A professional feather in cap with this approach is called BladeRunner ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572 ) which radically simplified the distributed system aspect by putting all the gnarly glue and business logic in a V8 VM (JavaScript). My next thing is a focus on board games where I have invented a programming language and have started to evolve a platform. It's called Adama ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ https://www.adama-platform.com/ ), and I think it is pretty cool. The interesting thing is that the complexity of board games is exceptional. I have a few clues to share. The first is that reactivity, which is found in excel, is a key to simplifying software as this makes the glue more automatic. Another clue is figuring out bidirectional communication which relates to reactivity as a two-way street. However, this is primarily hard because we don't have great things off the shelf to deal with this beyond TCP. For more of a deep dive, check out https://www.adama-platform.com/2021/12/22/woe.html https://www.adama-platform.com/2021/12/22/woe.html which talks about WebSocket. My final clue is that you can't run away from state. So many people offload state because state is hard, and you have to contend with it. I'm building yet another database.

ozim 4y ago
If you look from perspective of software creator that wants to handle all kind of timezones or post codes - yes humans complicate things. If you look from a person or user perspective - time zones or date formats are used in one location or in some context. People living in that context have it a lot easier because most of the time they don't care about other time zones. I would say people simplify things but on local scale. If you want to go global that is your problem not humans that live in one place and use single time zone all their life.

ozim 4y ago

If you look from perspective of software creator that wants to handle all kind of timezones or post codes - yes humans complicate things. If you look from a person or user perspective - time zones or date formats are used in one location or in some context. People living in that context have it a lot easier because most of the time they don't care about other time zones. I would say people simplify things but on local scale. If you want to go global that is your problem not humans that live in one place and use single time zone all their life.