[mattjaynes]

One of my favorite quotes from Rich Hickey:

"Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system - a system made out of genuinely simple parts, is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work. He's going to kick your ass. He's gonna spend more time simplifying things up front and in the long haul he's gonna wipe the plate with you because he'll have that ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around."

http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-key/

[tedunangst]

Fun nit: this is one of the times when effect is the correct word to use.

[Kaizyn]

Grammatically, ted is right on this one.

[derleth]

Depends on the variety of English. What you said is true for the prestige dialect, certainly.

[Kaizyn]

There ain't no such thing as a prestige dialect in English. In all of them, "affect change" is just plain wrong.

[derleth]

> There ain't no such thing as a prestige dialect in English.

I sincerely hope this is sarcasm.

> In all of them, "affect change" is just plain wrong.

Cite?

[Kaizyn]

Hello derleth:

"Effect. As noun, means result; as verb, means to bring about, accomplish (not to be confused with affect, which means "to influence")." http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk3.html

Affect vs. Effect: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sullivan/CommonWritingErrors.html#...

[derleth]

Those sources don't define correctness. Especially Strunk and White, which is pretty well debunked at this point:

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003463.php

[derleth]

Downvoting linguistic knowledge doesn't make it any less true.

[mtinkerhess]

I'd be curious to see an example of a dialect in which "to affect change" is more correct than "to effect change"?

[tedunangst]

Some people seem to like pushing descriptivism too far. "Somebody said it, therefore it's correct."

[hdevalence]

What basis for judgements of correctness would you suggest, if not facts about how English speakers speak English?

[FkZ]

Neither one is more correct in isolation as they mean different things.

[chongli]

Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff.

I hate to be cynical in a thread about a very optimistic and insightful speaker but I think that it will always be the case that people will trade off easy work early on for more pain late in the game. This is called hyperbolic discounting and it's an extremely common cognitive bias in humans. The only way we'll overcome this is through extensive education and a dramatic change in culture (particularly office culture).

[aero142]

I'll ask a question. Have you seen a correlation between companies that have simpler code bases and are more successful in the long run? Personally, I've never seen it. The most successful companies have horrible code bases that are eventually replaced by well written modular architectures if the become successful. I personally love the idea and value of simple code but I can't say I've seen a lot of evidence for it.

[lifeisstillgood]

that would be markets where the deciding factor is software. I suspect you are thinking of say windows where the quality of codebase was lesser factor than installed base etc

I would suggest that web browsers is a good example - IE market share vs say Mozilla. other examples are Sage vs freeagnet ?

hard to unpick market tactics and strategy from code - but it's hard to deny there is a link intuitively

[stonemetal]

My sense of what is intuitive follows his http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html

Basically code quality doesn't really matter, product vision is what matters.

[hcarvalhoalves]

That depends on whether this hypothetical codebase is an asset or a sunken cost.

[Kaizyn]

All code no matter how beautiful is a sunken cost.

[espeed]

Run upstairs...

"Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him." -- PG

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

[shuzchen]

My favorite quote (from "Are We There Yet?") is "I'm just trying to program without going crazy".

[babuskov]

True if your product is a success. But if you're building 10 projects and only one of then succeeds, you just spent 9 times enormous amount of time you will never get back. One could argue that rewriting the successful one from scratch would still take less time than that.

[dominotw]

Very nice quote. But I think I am having a hard time seeing the genius of it. There was voice in my head saying 'Duh..' as I finished reading it.

[fogus]

Did anyone say that it was genius? Taking something that some people see as "duh" and phrasing it in such a way as to provide clarity is a valuable thing.

[mythz]

Exactly this.