It's the reason Haskell has remained a niche language.
> I can't figure out what it is, or how it works; but I imagine it's quite simple once you actually know what it means.
You can't figure it out but you're sure it must be simple?
Newsflash: if you, a 1 in a 500 programmer who knows Haskell syntax cannot figure it out just by context, it's nowhere near simple.
Simple is when 9 out of 10 programmers understand the thing.
it's true that using a word with multiple meanings gives rise to ambiguity, and avoiding that by choosing a different word is desirable
unfortunately there isn't a better term for 'simple' in the sense of 'not possessed of much detail' or 'composed of very few parts'; saying 'non complex' doesn't really help because 'complex' is often used to mean 'difficult' for the same reason 'simple' is often used to mean 'easy'
except in hucksters' advertising brochures, i don't agree with your implicit assertion that all the polysemic complexity of 'simple' is merely historical, leaving only 'easy' as a live meaning; i think all the meanings i listed above except for 'harmless' have some currency today, even merely in english
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simple#Adjective lists nine main meanings of which seven are current, though i admit i just added the 'easy' one myself; it wasn't listed previously (i think because of confusion induced by the polysemy of 'complicated')
But there are some things that are just simple, like a Bankers Box.
we could try defining a new word for specifically this sense of 'simple'. for example, 'fivous', 'blorsy', 'bonatchy', 'jatomurous', or 'wislous'. the problem is that if the word gets adopted, it's likely to undergo the same sense shifts as its synonym 'simple'
Look at this comment thread and count all the instances where people are complaining that 'simple' is being used to describe difficult things:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759449
I'm not the only one who thinks that 'simple' should mean, in technical docs, 'easy'.
(By the way, any talk by Rich Hickey is worth watching)