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Comment by swsieber | Hacker News Reader

Your second sentence is a red herring that misses the point of that goal. Of course nobody has that goal (hopefully). But when people don't have that goal, complexity tends to creep in.

Simplicity rarely happens by chance in large software.

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Every time I've seen people have the simplicity goal from the outset, they inevitably have to at some point abandon it or their simple software gets replaced by software that has additional complexity. It often happens that the complex replacement then again grows too complex, and someone comes along with a simpler solution and the cycle repeats indefinitely. Firefox was supposed to be a simpler Mozilla, and when it got too complex, Chrome came out. I wouldn't be surprised that now that both of them are too complex, in a few more years someone comes out with a browser that is simpler than both of them and is intended to replace them both.

Software development, in a very essentialist sense, is nothing but complexity management. Trying to never have any complexity is a naïve view of what software is.

End users don't want simplicity, they want ease of use. Simple beautiful software is out there aplenty with diverse features, you just have to desire to use it.

They don't want simplicity until the app crashes. They don't want simplicity until their supposedly compatible older programs don't run. They don't want simplicity until a security breach takes out their business. They don't want simplicity until their custom software "can't be made portable, realistically. It'll all have to be rewritten." They don't want simplicity until the program's behavior changes, and it's not at all clear why, or how to recover. They don't want simplicity until they've lost or overwritten data for no reason that can be discovered.

In other words, it's not the falling that kills ya, it's hitting the ground.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

Very interesting take on things. From this point of view the virtue of the New Jersey Way is that they shorten this cycle, keeping things from getting way out of the ordinary f*ed up before the cycle restarts - after all, why wait 'till your car skids out and crashes before you replace your bald tires; that sort of thing.

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