[serve_yay]

I love Rich Hickey and I will watch any talk he ever gives. I believe I have seen them all at current.

Here's what drives me nuts about this one, though - it gets passed around a lot where I work, and people say how strongly they agree with him. There are real, concrete things he claims are not simple here! Things like for loops. And these people I'm talking about, they say they love this talk and then they say they love for loops. Really! I don't get it.

[tikhonj]

It's perfectly reasonable to agree wholeheartedly with his core idea (easy vs simple) but disagree with his particular pronouncements on what is and isn't simple. Which could involve for loops.

Now, personally, I don't have much to say about for loops one way or the other. But I do disagree with him on types, which can be far less complex than he intimates. System F, say, which largely covers F#, OCaml and Haskell, can be completely defined as a handful of self-evident rules. A single page for both checking and inference, if in somewhat dense notation. That's not complex at all, especially since it follows fairly naturally from the way the lambda calculus works even without types.

To me, that seems like a perfectly consistent view. Nothing forces you to take everything he says or leave it: you can find it accurate piecemeal. Take the mental framework but apply it with your own knowledge and experience and you could very well come up with your own conclusions.

Seems like the perfect way to use ideas like this.

[vezzy-fnord]

It's one thing to recognize simplicity versus ease of use, it's a wholly different thing to apply it. Ease of use is what is most trivially observable by an end user. Actually understanding the nature of the problem domain and properly evaluating architectures beyond making sweeping inferences from what the interface looks like, that is significantly more difficult. Despite all the lip service that gets payed towards simplicity, most people do not want it and it will be met by derision and scorn if the simple solution imposes a higher learning curve or does not make policy and integration decisions for the user. Especially considering the culture of coding bootcamps, DevOps, "get shit done" and "move fast and break things" by and large promotes an anti-intellectualism that is in stark opposition to deeply evaluating problem domains so you can come up with simple solutions.

[serve_yay]

Right, and so what you get is people saying something is "simple" when what they really mean is that they like it. Which is of course not Hickey's fault, it just irks me for some reason.