[graemeklass]

Keeping it simple is actually quite hard. As an engineer, almost every impulse of mine is to add more, more, more! I'm designing a consumer electronic device and the trick is to make it look simple to the user by making it quite complex inside.

[altano]

Yeah, I completely agree, but I don't think most people realize what this means. Deciding to make something simple isn't a choice you make up front. It's something you fight the whole way through. You have to fight your own temptations to add instead of subtract, you have to fight the cries of users who want just one more feature, etc. The simple thing to do will rarely be obvious

Look at the reaction to arc's release: it made people (who probably had no intention of building anything in it in the first place) enraged at its initial lack of unicode support. Imagine that... enraged at the lack of unicode support in the initial release of a programming language. It's hard to look at that reaction and realize what it really means: that Paul's probably on to something.

[edw519]

Yes. I know I'm making progress when "lines of code" starts DECREASING. Sometimes, the most sophisticated code is surprisingly small.