[olodus]

I would add one more thing to why simplicity is good: - it is easier to reach consensus on.

I have started to realize that so much in our society is how it is because we need some kind of consensus to move forward. And so much of added complexity exists because there are no good consensus.

Think about OS portability for example. If we had consensus on the OS APIs then there would be no cost to portability at all almost. But it is a complex thing and hard to get consensus on so we can't have things that is compiled towards an ISA and then runs everywhere. If something is super simple then it will be easier to make a consensus among people that it should be adopted.

But this also connects to the topic of this article, if it is easy to create a consensus among others about it that might be bad for business. That will make it super easy to compete with you. And make it harder for you to sell it (it is hard to figure out how to monetize open source).

[DanielHB]

This is partly why browsers and javascript got so much traction. Also why I expect webassembly to eventually be the default compilation target. Who knows WASI might evolve to be that de-facto OS API layer

From wikipedia:

Solomon Hykes, a co-founder of Docker, wrote in 2019, "If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to create Docker. That's how important it is. WebAssembly on the server is the future of computing." Wasmer, out in version 1.0, provides "software containerization, we create universal binaries that work anywhere without modification, including operating systems like Linux, macOS, Windows, and web browsers. Wasm automatically sandboxes applications by default for secure execution".