An interesting assertion in Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy talk is that simple and complex are almost objective qualities, at least when you accept the definiti

An interesting assertion in Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy talk is that simple and complex are almost objective qualities, at least when you accept the definitions he puts forth (simple: one fold/braid with no interleaving). I think he's right, but I'm not sure I agree entirely, only because I haven't spent enough time thinking about it and trying to apply the ideas to real world problems. I do think that most programmers can call out complexity without a lot of disagreement. What you describe regarding fold vs for-loops touches on his definition of easy, that is to say "close at hand". Fold is easy for a functional programmer, for-loops for a Python programmer. Their simpleness might be a different matter. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy