[gruseom]

I like simplicity. Simplicity tends to perform well, and being simple also means it has little space for problems.

Amen.

I saw an old interview with Chuck Moore a while ago in which he said: I like simplicity and efficiency. That struck me. How often do people put those two things together? We're conditioned to think of them as a tradeoff. But if you can have both, shouldn't we be trying hard for that? Which raises another question: what do you have to give up in exchange for both simplicity and efficiency?

[chc]

It's because "simple" can be a measure of different things. C is a pretty simple and straightforward language, but it takes 10 times as much code to do anything, which could be said to be quite a bit more complex.

[kainosnoema]

In my experience, it takes an incredible amount of effort and experience to solve a complex problem with simplicity and efficiency. It's well worth it, but there's definitely a cost, and not everyone is capable of it.

[gruseom]

That's been my experience too. Part of this difficulty, though, is that it requires going against our training and culture. This raises the question of how much easier it might get with different training and culture.

That's one thing that's so intriguing about Moore. He's a living specimen of an alternate computing history. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he had been in, say, Backus's position at the dawn of high-level languages.

[caf]

I tend to feel that the two often go together. After all, "the key to making a program fast is to make it do as little as possible".