[Skinney]

> Simplicity would be to have a single mechanism for landing the Curiosity. Not 3. With one of them being a crane drop from a hovering rocket!?

Why? Simple, in the way Rich Hickey advocates, means the opposite of complex, which means that things are woven together. You can have many landing strategies without them being tightly coupled together. A huge system isn't necessarily complex.

[taeric]

That is the catch, all three landing strategies were coupled together. You couldn't do one without the one before it. More, previous steps had to take into account the baggage (literal) that was necessary to perform later steps.

[sooheon]

If that's the best they could do and what got the job done, good. It's as simple as was possible and necessary. What exactly does this prove against simplicity, again?

[taeric]

The difference between "simple" and "as simple as possible" is the crux.

Mainly, the problem is that these speeches all talk about keeping things simple. In many problems, this can't be done. Understanding the simple helps. But the actual solution will not be simple. So any newspeak to get around that is just annoying.

[Skinney]

Why not?

[taeric]

See my above post. As simple as possible is a far cry from simple. That is all I am saying.

I extend that into saying that people that can understand complicated things, as well, will have an advantage.

[Skinney]

A simple system can solve complicated things. When Rich Hickey talks about simple, he is referring to tight coupling, "death by specificity" and hard to understand concurrency. Having a system that does multiple things, isn't necessarily a complicated system. A Mars landing, which in itself is a difficult (though not necessarily complex) problem, can be solved by a simple system. An example of this is Unix. A simple system that does complicated things.

[Skinney]

I thought you were speaking about different strategies, but in this case you're describing three different stages of an overall landing strategy. That doesn't sound complex.