There is a great presentation [1] by Rich Hickey about simplicity. He makes a point in keeping the words "simple" and "easy" semantically separate. This post is

There is a great presentation [1] by Rich Hickey about simplicity. He makes a point in keeping the words "simple" and "easy" semantically separate. This post is a wonderful example why that makes lots of sense. None of these examples really show anything that's decidedly simple. They're all about ease of use and backward compatibility (which is a particular case of ease of use). It seems like "easy" can be further subdivided into several useful and objective categories. Clearly, libpng was only concerned with some aspects of "easy" (portability) and not others. Also, I absolutely hate the kind of fatalism you often see in SE articles. "Oh, gosh, nothing is really simple, nothing really is bug-free, nothing is really good, so you shouldn't even try." [1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy