On simplicity

Today someone brought to my attention the quote from http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/02/css-and-meaning-of-life.html :

<<And then there is one element of my quality metric which seems to be at  the heart of the controversy: I believe that computers are meant to  serve people and not the other way around.  That means that if something
 inherently simple is difficult to do, it's wrong.

Not  everyone agrees with this.  A surprising number of people like things to be difficult.  I have never understood this, but it is a fact.  Some  people revel in the intellectual studliness of mastering, say, C++
template programming or x86 assembler.  I don't.  I think C++ is a pain in the ass.  Life is short, and I would rather spend my allotted time skiing or making love to my wife than worrying about whether or not I need to define a virtual destructor in my base class in order to avoid memory leaks.  And that means that when I want, say, for something to appear centered on the screen, I want to be able to do it by typing "center" rather than "margin:auto".  If I can't tell a computer to center something by saying "center", then as far as I'm concerned the computer is wrong, not me.

Like I said, not everyone buys in to this worldview.  I don't get it, but it is surprisingly common.  I think it might have something to do with job security.  I first encountered the complicated-is-beautiful mindset when I was working for NASA.  I had an idea for how to simplify spacecraft sequencing and make it less error prone.  I figured everyone would love it.  To the contrary, the establishment fought the idea tooth-and-nail (and still does to this day).  And this attitude is everywhere.  It's the reason the tax code is so fucked up.  It's the reason the law is so byzantine.  It's the reason that languages like C++ and Perl thrive.>>

I see a major issue with this kind of thinking. Now, let me get this straight: I don't normally do the web stuff, so i don't have a whole lot of opinion about CSS as such. For what opinion I have, I agree with Ron that CSS sucks and personally I like to see everything in one file without artificially splitting it. Nothing is worse than dealing with lots of small files with cross-dependencies. For what it's worth, I hate JavaScript and the web sites written with it, why do they have to be so slow and annoying?

But let's return to the subject, about the simplicity. I think there is more than one failure on Ron's part.

First of all, he seems to miss that everyone has a different definition of simplicity. And that applies not only to him but to many other people, and not only to the simplicity but to many other subjects. There are many people who like to quote the Principle of the Least Surprise. But then they go and propose the solutions that surprise me immensely.

My favorite example is a poll where people were asked, whether they think that they're better drivers than average, and more than 80% of them answered "yes". And then the article about that poll went on to talk about how people overestimate themselves. What the article failed to appreciate though is that everyone has a different definition of what a "good driver" is. Some people think that it means driving faster, some think that it means driving slower, some think that showing the turn signals is important, some don't know about the existence of the turn signals. Sure enough, most people strive to be good drivers by their own definition, and really become the good drivers by their own definition. The remaining 20% must have been the really lousy drivers.

So in my reckoning C++ and Perl are the simple languages. They allow for simple and easy writing and reading of the code. Yeah, C++ has some strange points, like why not make these virtual destructors mandatory if you define the virtual methods? And the early C++ really was a pain. But after the addition of templates it became awesome. It's not that you want to use the templates for everything, and you specifically don't want to use the stuff from the Alexandrescu book in any actual project. And they really need the explicit loops instead of the stupid functional recursion, and a better error diagnostics. But when they're used right, they're awesome. The modern C++ really combines the simplicity aspects of C and Perl. And Perl is an awesome simple language. It's driven by how to make things easy and convenient to use.

See, there are at least two definitions of simplicity. One definition thinks that simplicity equals logic and consistency, that everything that is logical and consistent is simple. The other definition thinks that things should be easy to use. The typical problems need to be solvable with minimal effort, and if that requires inconsistency, so be it, the consistency is of not much use by itself. If we look at the classic programming languages, C is convenient while Pascal is all-consistent (and oh so much pain to use). Perl is convenient, Python is consistent (and oh so much pain to use, have you ever tried to read the code in Python?). C++ is convenient, Java is consistent (and is just incredibly painful to use, it's like raising the sun with manual labor). Shell is convenient, PowerShell is consistent (and well, you've got my drift).

Second, the wrong kind of simplicity is bad. During my time at Google, I've actually heard with my own ears someone say: "The system has got so many features to it that it became difficult to modify, so we had to throw it away and rewrite from scratch without the extra features". This is I think a pinnacle of how things can go wrong. Yes, a system without many features is much easier to write. And probably keeping just 80% of the features would make is much easier to maintain. But there is a good reason for the features, they make the system easy to use. Nobody needs a system with 80% of the features because it becomes unusable. And well, if someone can't understand and maintain it, well, they're probably the wrong people to do the job.

That said, of course there is a limit: there are features that make the life of the users convenient and the features for the sake of features. The first kind is good, the second kind is bad, and telling which is which may sometimes be pretty hard. It might not even be that someone (er, marketing) had included the features for the sake of features, they might have been a good idea at some point and then got supplanted by the better ways. But things evolve, and sometimes there is time for some features to die. But not wholesale and not by the principle of simplicity of implementation or for some dumb consistency. The best and most simple-to-use features are often difficult to implement and full of quirks. But that's because the tasks they're solving are difficult and full of quirks, and the features make these tasks easy by covering the complexity and adopting to the quirks.