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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Most things in life and programming exist on a trade off curve of goodness vs simplicity. Making the thing better means giving up simplicity. Making it simple means removing features people want.

Geniuses invent new ways to get both. Those ideas permanently move the trade off curve outwards.

In programming, some abstractions which have done this are: Operating systems (Abstracting away the hardware), Grace Hopper’s invention of program libraries, high level languages and compilers, HTTP and JSON, tcp/ip (replacing custom transmission protocols), and there’s lots more. Calculus and the Arabic numeral system are examples in mathematics. (It’s insanely difficult to multiply using Roman numerals!)

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I once read a book called "simplicity" by de bono I think it was...

He made the point (I think) that you do want simplicity, you don't want simplistic. That is: it should be able to do all the things you want to, but in an easy to use manner.

Worth striving for I believe.

"Simple" isn't always easy either.

To me, simplicity means that there's clarity of purpose for each component and how it interfaces with other components. A large system can still be simple if the interactions and interfaces between the different components are reasonably well understood and justifiable. I think thoughtful UI design is how you prevent complexity. The UI for developers and software is the API.

When you start adding features and instead of generalizing you simply (heh) add a special case to allow two unrelated components to communicate, and then another, and another, until the two components become dependent on each other such that neither can do anything without the other; then you have a complex system, and the "UI" for the developer is worse because it's full of seemingly random elements in random places that only do one very specific thing.

>Operating systems (Abstracting away the hardware), Grace Hopper’s invention of program libraries, high level languages and compilers, HTTP and JSON, tcp/ip (replacing custom transmission protocols)

How many of us get to work at such lofty problems though?

>Calculus and the Arabic numeral system are examples in mathematics.

Eye roll. Of course reducing complexity is the very essence of mathematics. Let us not pretend that software engineers are mathematicians.

> How many of us get to work at such lofty problems though?

How many of us choose to work on such lofty problems? You can work on whatever you want, whenever you want. But lofty, unproven ideas don’t pay Google salaries. Your career is a choice, not a prison.

And of course most software engineers aren’t mathematicians. We’re talking about genius - and most of us are a long way from that. Most of us are lucky if we manage to invent a couple complexity reducing concepts in our entire careers.

But lots of great computer science ideas have “come down the mountain” from mathematics adjacent work. Functional programming wasn’t invented by C lovers like me. But I love closures, pure functions, and map / filter / reduce. This stuff makes certain problems lovely. And we wouldn’t have any of this without mathematically minded CS.

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