I think HN might find discussions more productive if commenters were more specific when they discussed the simplicity of their favorite tools. Qualifying an ent

I think HN might find discussions more productive if commenters were more specific when they discussed the simplicity of their favorite tools. Qualifying an entire language as "simple" isn't very descriptive when the word often describes totally opposite languages. When someone talks about a language, I'd rather they talk about what exactly it is the language simplified and where it hid the rest of the complexity. One can only simplify a Turing Complete language so much before the it starts running up against the limits of Kolmogorov Complexity. After that point, the best we can do is shuffle it around - under the bed, or under the sofa, or inside the closet, or into a corner - depending on each programmer's preferences. When people talk about abstraction for example, they really mean reducing mental complexity. The pro is that we can reason about a larger percentage of our programs by being able to fit more code into our limited working memory. The con is that something other than our brain (e.g. algorithm w) has to do the heavy lifting. With abstraction, all the little details (the complexity) still exist somewhere, we just don't have to look at most of them.